Apocatastasis

I see several indications in the reality check spread of impending change:  a ten adjacent to a reversed ace (completion of one cycle, and another ready to begin); Kings at both crown and base, with the one at the base reversed (symbolizing a potential, not yet manifest); and the only Major Trumps in the spread are opposite each other on the same level, reversed (again, something existing in potential), with both cards symbolically related to change or unstable situations.

King of Stones in the Crown position, denoting where you are on your spiritual path, suggests a concrete, earthy, materialistic and pragmatic view of or approach to spiritual matters, and/or some adamant, stubbornly held beliefs.  King of Pears reversed at the base indicates a potential shift to a more intuitive approach and more fluid, flexible perspective.

Two cards in the suit of Stones, denoting the Earth element (physical matters or material things) are on the material level of the spread.  Four on the left side and six in the center indicate that the worst of an ongoing crisis is past, but you drag it out through negative expectations.  The reversed Ace of Serpents (suit of elemental Fire, spirit, energy, creativity) on the right indicates that inspiration and/or creative action can potentially provide a solution and way out of the crisis.

The next level up:  feelings, emotions and relationships, has the two of Serpents on the left, suggesting that your discontent stems from difficulty at the beginning of a cycle of spiritual experience or a creative endeavor.  It is as if you took the first step and ran into an obstacle.  The ten of Blades opposite that two suggests that you have reached an intellectual plateau or anticlimax, and that this (probably an awareness that you can neither go back nor stay where you are) gives you the motivation to keep trying to break through that initial obstacle on the new path.  Seven of Pears (suit of alchemical Water, emotions, intuition) in the center indicates emotional growth, progress, and improvement in interpersonal relations.

  Flanking the King of Stones on the top level (spirit), are the two reversed Major cards:  Changer on the left and Hanging Man on the right.  Changer represents an Aquarian Age evolution of the old Magician.  In this placement and the reversed position, it suggests that impediments to spiritual progress exist in reluctance or conceptual inability to own and exercise your creative power, to consciously co-create your reality.

  The reversal of the card on the right or “positive” side means that the ideas symbolized by this card are what you need to understand and internalize in order to progress further on your spiritual path.  Essentially, this man is hung up between past and future.  One foot is stuck in the past, while the other just lightly rests on the future, uncertain about what lies ahead, hesitant to move on.  Nostalgia gets you nowhere, but keeps you in discomfort and sadness — and not just you but everyone to whom you are attached, by their bonds or your own.

Synthesizing both these Major cards, what is needed to get moving is more openness, courage, curiosity, confidence, conscious action instead of unconscious creation  — in other words, more acting from intention and less reactivity.  Before you can exercise your full power, you must realize it is yours and trust yourself to use it.

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Your question concerned the “troubled dynamic” in your relationship with your mother.  For this reading, I’m using a 21-card Gypsy spread (also called Horseshoe Spread) and the Golden Dawn Tarot.

Your part of this “dynamic” comes essentially from the fact that you didn’t come into this life as a blank slate.  You possess wisdom gained in past lives, and you carry expectations born of those other experiences.  These expectations are unreasonable given your present circumstances, but that doesn’t make them any less compelling.

Your mother, of course, knows nothing of this.  She fights you.  She responds to your need for autonomy by trying harder to control you.  She expects, consciously and self-righteously, as the elder, the kind of deference and subservience from you that your past experiences lead you to unconsciously expect from the world.  She reacts with sterner repression if you rebel against her.  Conflict escalates.

She loves you with all her heart and understands you not at all.  In fact, there’s a lot about this reality that she fails to understand. The soul connection that might resolve your conflicts just doesn’t exist.  Matters of the soul, and beliefs about soul matters, are further sources of conflict between you.  Her father or father-figure was controlling and domineering, which impaired her emotional development.  You expect her to display emotional maturity she doesn’t possess, while she wants things from you that you can’t give and she has no right to demand.

You need to be concerned more with yourself and your own “dynamic” than with your mother or any of your other relationships.  It is time for you to own your power and begin to attain your creative potential.  The fifth section of this spread echoes the theme of the reality check, above.  Your current material circumstances:  work, home, lifestyle, habits, etc., are acting like a cork in a bottle, a dam across a stream, a lid on a boiling pot.  I don’t see your conflicts easing or a ticket to paradise dropping into your lap, but things do have to change.  As the other spread indicated, the current situation is unstable.

To make the kind of break that will work to your advantage, don’t think too much about it.  You could spend the rest of your life weighing pros and cons.  If you don’t make the move toward the monastery soon, you might find yourself committed to another course, and never make it.  If it is what you truly desire, now is the time.

na-relle

The most obvious aspect of this reading, an impression that immediately jumps out at me, is a clear conflict between intellect and spirit.  The intellect involved is immature, programmed by culture, with a bottom-heavy education focusing on the material plane and deficient on the mental/emotional and spiritual planes.  The entire left-hand column of the spread, the side dealing with “negatives” –  obstacles, challenges, lacks — is in the suit of Blades, the element of Air, symbolizing intellectual thought and verbal communication.

The “overview” card at the base is Page of Blades reversed, a young person expressing the negative aspects of Air qualities:  competitiveness, inconstancy, inconsistency, two-facedness, deceit, ego-driven striving for attention.

On the physical/material level, fearful emotions are the result of a mind monopolized by linear logic, and excessive attention to material needs, wants, losses and lack, with an incomplete understanding of The Flow, creativity, holistic thinking, and spirituality.

The emotional level further expands on those fears.  The card in the center is the first of two Major Trumps in this spread:  Actor.  The “mask” the subject wears is bland and purposely non-threatening, more defense than disguise.  Anyone with perception who pays attention can see the real person behind the mask.  He or she hides more from self than from others.  There is some idealism involved, a desire to project what is judged as “right” or “good,” without regard for the value of truth.

The effect of this deception is self-disempowerment.  Creativity comes through the true self.  The greatest artistic masterworks are those that reveal the artist’s innermost self.  Relationships based on false projections and false impressions eventually get down to the truth, or they either end or proceed unhappily.  The card’s symbols denote how one can gain power, prestige, wisdom and contentment by dropping the mask.

Two of Blades on the left, denotes an inability to wrap one’s mind around the reality here.  That difficulty of logical, linear intellect to adequately describe or understand emotions or higher spiritual realities presents an obstacle to happiness and emotional fulfillment, as well as to the formation of healthy lasting relationships.  Balancing it on the other side, the strengths or resources represented by the right-hand column, the two of Serpents suggests that spiritual experience and/or creative fulfillment can provide the way out, but one has difficulty opening to inspiration.

On the top level, spirit, the center card is the Mother, representing creative energies in stasis.  Symbolically she is pictured as pregnant, delicately balanced, in possession of power and creative energy but keeping it cloaked and unexpressed.  Like pregnancy, this condition cannot endure forever. How it ends depends on the subject’s choices and actions.  Inaction characterizes the present situation.  It feels to me like a fearful paralysis.

The “obstacle” card here is three of Blades, a student’s status, still learning and in this case (because of the card’s placement) learning things that will only increase the difficulty of breaking out of the creative stasis, a dead-end course of study.  The balancing card on the other side is five of Stones.  In a seeming paradox, a material (physical or financial) crisis is the asset that can set the subject on a more productive course.

Please let me know if I may be of further service.  You will need to consult further with Greyfox about the past-life reading you requested before he will be willing to begin on it.

quitchick 

Change is coming.  Change is due, and it might feel like overdue.  Spiritually, you’re on an anticlimactic emotional plateau and you know — you are inescapably aware — that you couldn’t stay there even if you wanted to.

And yet you resist change.  There are choices to be made, and thinking about them does not resolve your indecision.  You just don’t know, and without knowing the right move, you could make a wrong choice.

Gone from your life now is a mentor and protector, a father figure you could never replace.  Instead, you are on your own in a way that you never have been… on your own, but not alone.  Relationships and human bonds are the only areas I see where you are securely in control and unafraid.  Even though you face the unknown in every aspect of life, where your loved ones are involved it is with more of a sense of adventure than uncertainty.

First, let’s look at your strengths.  In your comfort zone of people and relationships, generally, you are optimistic, lucky and secure.  You have put a lot of effort into self-mastery and it has paid off in a poise that is largely unconscious now.  You are comfortable in your own skin.  Your conscious focus is creative.  Conflicts exist at the edge of your awareness, but you choose happiness.

In order to make the decisions facing you and initiate changes that will work in your best interests, you need the courage to trust the inner guidance of Spirit.  You are now being challenged to make the “empty-handed leap into the void.”  In symbolic terms, you are called upon to “drink the cup of fire,” to do something that seems risky, even self-destructive.  That’s the seeming.  The reality is that you would be submerging one self in a Higher Self.

A cup of fire or a cauldron of fire doesn’t seem like something to approach too closely.  When the “fire” is the power and energy of Spirit, taking it in, opening to inspiration, empowers us.  Jumping into it, immersing ourselves in it, transmutes us.  When we place ourselves where spiritual “fire” meets the “water” of the unconscious mind, we are energized by the steam erupting from their joining.  That is where the knowing that you seek can come from.

-Technical notes:  10-card Tree of Life spread, Book of T (I AM ONE) Tarot.  Minor cards:  Blade King rev. bottom left; Pear 10 center top; 3 of Blades top right; 3 of Stones mid-left; 3 of Serpents center bottom.  Major Trumps:  Knower rev. top left; Victorious One center; Nameless One mid-right; Deliverer rev. bottom right; Changer rev. at Base.