Tag: yang

Deep

Bringing the week in for a landing with a look back at the Page of Cups

If you enjoy this FREE Tarot content, please think of me when you want an affordable, professional private Tarot reading. Sage Sips free blog and social media is not ad monetized and depends on your support through private reading purchases, memberships and virtual coffee gifts.

Some weeks, energies linger. Some weeks they grow and fade slowly or by small amounts.

This morning feels like one of those 90 degree lightcycle turns from the movie Tron.

Last weekend and earlier this week there was a very active, warrior archetype energy. Today “spooling down” comes to mind. It feels like we’ve just landed a plane and are going through the power-down checklist. It feels like the end of a cycle much bigger than a day or a week. The cycle may even be something that has been brewing in the background for you for the past 12 to 18 months. I read somewhere that this is the time of year that the Maori people celebrate new year…a thread from Neil DeGrasse Tyson maybe? Something about the New Year for them being tied to the rising of Pleiades during southern hemisphere winter. Anyway – even though we are in the middle of the “dog days” of summer here, cycles of nature within cycles of nature can be found anywhere, almost anytime.

It makes sense that the Page of Cups energy is stepping forward today.

Usually the Page of Cups, the “growing energy” card from Monday’s Energy Path reading, has a playful feel, acting as a reminder of life’s absurdities. It has a much different tone today. All of the cup’s court cards have an element of emotional depth to them. Instead of the absurd, the fish is resonating with its classic symbolism representing the human psyche. Today instead of looking life’s absurdities in the eye, we are being asked to look ourselves in the eye and know our own depths.

When I’m reverse engineering a collective energy reading into a previously chosen card like this, sometimes I’ll browse quote sources like BrainyQuotes.com or Goodreads.com for inspiration. That’s how I found “I want you to be everything you feel is you, deep in the center of your being.” It is attributed to Confucius. I’m no expert on the Analects or Chinese translation, but it doesn’t strike me as something Confucius would say. It sounds vastly more contemporary.

Confucius or not, it does resonate with Socrates’ famous “Know thyself.” You have to have some idea about what is deep within in order to live it, to be it.

I connect this to today’s Page of Cups two ways.

First is just that. Look deep. Know thyself so you can be and live thyself fully and authentically.

Second I want to go back to the idea of resonance that we’ve talked about before.

When you are reading Tarot (for yourself or for others) you want to know what is internal and what is external – know what is really your mood and what is you vibrating along with the overall, general, zeitgeist sort of energies. That is as true for energies that are winding down as when they are starting up.

A helpful way to sort that out is to focus on your energy boundaries. Sometimes that is put into words as “strengthening your aura” or “Closing your energy field”.

Try this: Lace your fingers together, then close your eyes and imagine you are surrounded by a colorful soap bubble. How does it feel. What do you sense as the difference (if any) between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’? If your shielded energy is the same as before, the sense of things is coming from the inside – its you. If it is different – it is still you, but a you that is strongly vibing to external conditions.

Today ‘in here’ is jamming to Stanton Moore and feeling pretty nominal in the mission control sense of the word – everything is in normal limits, no alarms.

Out there is that end of cycle, coming in for an uneventful landing shift in energy.

Either way, this weekend is a good time for ‘normal’ not to push, shift into yin from a long time of yang

Either way, I wish you a good weekend. See you Monday for the next Energy Path for next week!

Thanks for reading! See you at the next sip! – Sage

Under Doing

That old shoe commercial was on to something.

Hi and welcome to TaoCraft Tarot blog and podcast. I’m glad you are here. TaoCraft Short Ship is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee.

Today’s card is the seven of cups.

Cups, very generally speaking, have to do with emotions. The seven in particular has to do with emotions that are overwhelmed, typically by overthinking or too many options. Marketing calls it “decision paralysis” as I recall.

I’ve talked about this with some other Tarot readers. We tend to be thinkers, and overthinking can really bog things down, believe me.

It is a natural thing. There are reasons why startled frozen indecision is compared to “a deer in headlights.” Being put suddenly on the spot can stop decision making in its tracks just as much as overthinking or overwhelming options can.

Regardless of why, what do you do when you can’t decide what to do?

Not to sound too much like a bad fortune cookie, the answer is right there in the quetion.

Do.

If you are overthinking, get out of your head and into your body. Exercise. Wash the dishes. Take a warm shower. Sip a tea. Go for a walk. They call stuff like that “clearing your head” for a reason.

Do.

Turn your attention from the mental realm toward the physical realm for a while. Don’t worry. You can get right back to your overthinking when you are done. You might just discover that after a short break to do something in meatspace that the overthinking is so overwhelming anymore.

The same thing works when the thing that has you stopped in your tracks is big, difficult emotions. Emotions may follow you around while you do it, but again, shift your focus to the physical for a while. Intense emotions might need a little more physical effort. This might need a run instead of a walk, or some serious housework instead of just doing the dishes, and it certainly isn’t going fix everything. Don’t walk away from your emotions forever, but a short walk around the block so to speak isn’t a terrible idea.

It’s the balance of opposites, balance of yin and yang thing.

Sometimes when your emotional self or your mental self is over-doing things, the physical self might be under-doing things a little bit. Turn up the physical a little bit to help balance the overworked and overwhelmed mind and spirit.

Thank you so much for listening. The free Tarot readings on the blog and podcast are not monetized – energy’s message to you comes first, not an advertiser’s. If you enjoy these sips of Tarot, please visit the TaoCraft Tarot ko-fi page where memberships and more all support the blog and podcast. Membership includes extra readings, exclusive how to read Tarot posts and shop discounts.

Your questions are always welcome in the blog comments. There is a link to the blog for all of you podcast listeners. Any likes, subs, or shares that you can give are also much appreciated.

Thanks again. See you at the next sip!

Today’s Tarot: Inner Fire, Outer Flow

To have the flow, you gotta have the fire

Today’s card connects with yesterday’s post, but as much to the “why bother” thread of it as the part about clarity. Even though we are looking at single cards on separate days, it gives you a glimpse of how it works for multiple cards in a single layout. These kinds of connections between cards is where rubber meets the road when it comes to larger Tarot readings. You can memorize individual cards all day long, but when you do a multiple card layout unless you can knit them all together into a coherent message, you are missing a big part of the reading’s value. That’s where experience and a professional reading can come in handy.

Today’s card has a very active, additive sort of energy because of that connection. That’s how it works, in my style of Tarot reading. We start with a foundation and build. Sometimes, there is a yin, inward energy and reading will peel off layers to get to the heart of the message. Even though it is a single card, today has a yang, outward sort of message where layers build to find the totality of the message, a little like the related post “Growing Ogres.”

At the base we have the page of wands. Pages are about learning, a very growth energy in and of itself. Wands has to do with inner fire. Add to that the thread from yesterday. Why bother? Why not languish and float and experience and be? No reason, except that it isn’t our nature. The universe is put together in a slightly different way.

To have flow, you mush have fire.

If there is no energy, molecules don’t move. Absolute zero temperature is defined as the point where all atom lose all physical movement. There are quantum physics things going on, but I don’t pretend to understand any of that. But the high school take away is that for molecules to move, there has to be some degree of heat. For that tiniest bit of flow there has to be that tiniest bit of heat/fire. It is in the fabric of the universe for fire and flow to go together.

Flow is an interesting idea. On one hand it is yang…moving not still, outward, not inward. On the other hand it is yin in that “going with the flow” is passive and takes a certain inner peace to not fight the current – both literally and figuratively. Hence my admiration for surfers and surf culture despite being a land locked suburbanite. Flow is a very Taoist thing, encompassing both yin and yang. Flow is in our nature, so having direction and energy is part of our nature.

So yes, bother. That’s what the quote from FL Lucas yesterday meant by “take trouble.” Take the time and go to the trouble and bother to find your clarity, go in your direction, walk your talk, grow, flow.

Learn your direction. Gain your clarity. But the other half our nature is to follow the flow that clarity and understanding dictates.

Life and movement go hand in hand. It is our nature to have inner fire and outer flow.

Today’s Tarot: Big Little Things

In the taijitu (the yin yang symbol) each half contains a dot of the opposite color. The idea is that anything in the extreme can become its opposite. There are different ways of reading the I Ching, the book of changes. Throwing three coins is the method I know best and have used the most. I’ll spare you all the details, but you use three coins to determine if a given “line” is yine or yang. Six throws, gives you six lines, and that in turn tells you which part of the book to read for your guidance. Using coins, heads mean yang and tails mean yin. If you get two of three coins showing one way or the other, that tells you the definition of the ‘line’ as either yin or yang. If you get all three coins the same it is considered a “changing line” which means it is SO yin or SO yang that it can easily tip over into being its opposite (or is in the process of doing so)

The Ten of Coins is a liminal symbol like a transition line. Coins (or Pentacles, depending on the deck you use) have to do with the physical realm, wealth, career, etc. 10 is the largest of the number cards before you move into the esoteric, idea-driven court cards. 10, in this case, is something coming to fruition or completion. It is the uber-pentacle of all the number cards. Given all of that, you might expect to see material successes represented, the Tarot equivalent of a mansion and a yacht.

Not so.

The Ten of Pentacles is the happy family card. It shows simple contentment, in the RWS tradition usually mom, dad, their 2.2 kids, white picket fence, grampa and the dog. Granted, that sounds like a 1950s surburban ideal gone wild, but that’s kind of the point. The pinnacle of material success isn’t material at all. The pinnacle of material success is the people you love and simple contentment with the cycles and flows of life. Life, love and simple mindful pleasures are, after all, the greatest of treasures. All those little things are really kind of big.

12 Second Tarot: Temperance (aka the cure for Mecury retrograde)

 

Stop. Just stop for a second. 

Take a deep breath. Take a look around. Get the information about where you are, so you can catch your breath and catch your balance before moving on.

Things have been pretty yang lately, energetically speaking. Yin and yang, outward, inward, pushing, taking in….all of those things apply on a mental level as well as the physical.

Choosing is a mentally active thing, even in those times when you choose to do nothing or choose to decide later. Choosing not to choose is still a choice, even when made through apathy or inattention. It is still doing a thing. So is stopping, at least for a moment, to regain your balance.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t resonate with astrology on a lot of levels, most of all with the whole Mercury retrograde thing. I mean, take a tiny step above the ecliptic plane and Mercury moves just fine. Look. Look at the planetary movement from the big picture, from top down. A little shift in perspective and POOF! No problem.

So stop. Just stop.

The cure for all the frustrations that social media looooves to blame on Mercury is to go from frenetic mental yang to a moment of mental yin. Stop. Re-calibrate. Re-orient. Re-balance. And Re-member how the solar system actually works. Think of this trick-of-eye retrograde time as a time for mental yin. Naturally, if you push and keep a frenetic yang spider-monkey-on-amphetamines state of mind during a yin quiet-and-observe energy time, you are going to be blocked and frustrated. If, as Neil Degrasse Tyson says, “The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” then neither are the energies of the universe obliged to cater to your agenda. Like the rhythm of the planets, energies ebb and flow. Sometimes energy is right for a large and in charge King of Passions and Choices like we saw yesterday with the King of Pentacles. Other times the energies are right for a moment of watching, mixing, balancing. 

The Tao in TaoCraft is about finding harmony with energies as they are then making a better way forward. Tarot has a card for that.