Hmmm...is it popular demand or is a nagging voice telling me I'm just not paying enough attention to my intuitions? Either way, after a long hiatus, I'll be setting up shop very shortly where I will be available for my down-to-earth telephone tarot readings. Hey! I'm even dusting off my framed certificate that says "Certified Professional Psychic Counselor"...

For those of you who are interested, I specialize in the shorter readings -- 15 minutes for $25 and 30 minutes for $40. Very occasionally will I do a reading for a whole hour. I like to focus on your questions and your concerns and begin to address them right away. If you'd like longer readings, I can refer to you several experienced and trusted readers.

It's very exciting about starting over once again! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop me a note...

I just love spring. Here's an article written by a dear friend on the wonders of spring...

Gaudy, Giddy, Giggly Spring Fever

by Mama Donna Henes

During the first part of spring, the vernal birth waters break. The skies open. It rains, it pours, it mists, it drips fertilizing fluids from the heavens, which fructify the fields. The air is damp like a baby's bottom. The land is soaked through, water logged. The mud, like mucous, like after-birth, is seething with the stuff of life.

The defrosting sodden soil is teeming, churning with every creepy crawly thing that ever slithered out of a swamp. Hordes of birds descend, drawn by the juicy feast. Animals awaken from their pregnant hibernations, skinny, starving and suckling their young. Birds and beasts, alike, set out on a concerted feeding frenzy, gorging themselves and their ravenous, insatiable, mouths-ever-open offspring.

By mid-spring, the tantrum storms, like the terrible two's of the early, chilly part of the season, have finally stilled. The winds and rains have gentled. There is a new calmness, a certain steadier confidence in the air. Nature has dug in Her roots and taken hold. Once-tentative buds have unfolded and flourished.

Flowers, food and forage are abundant and extravagantly fragrant. The leaves on trees and bushes are that particular fluorescent pea green shade that we see only once a year at this time. Earth and Her species are spread green with the surging effervescent, aphrodisiac substance of life. The sap, the shoot, the root, the bud, the bark, the branch, the trunk, the tree of life.

The second half of spring is the growing time when life seems to shoot up out of the ground and keep on going forever forward, reaching and grasping for growth. This is the energy that we used to call, "the wonder years." All the vernal new-borns, having outgrown generations of teeth, baby down, feathers, pelts and ridiculously expensive sneakers, are now frenetic with raging hormones. All-too-ready, set, to go and strike out on their own, determined to produce and reproduce.

The merry month of May marks the high-spirited puberty rite of passage into adolescence for the flora and fauna offspring of Mother Earth. The season, itself, is a bang-up celebration of exuberant youth in all its boundless energy, innocent ardor and potential creativity. And all the land is dressed up and decorated for the festivities.

On these glorious days of May, it feels as if the whole world is in the throes of a contagious spring fever. We are aswirl in a delirious dance of motion, emotion, an exhilarating carnival ride of heady smells and riotous color. Life all around is gaudy, giddy, giggly.

The mood is catchy and we get carried away in the enthusiastic spirit. Almost without giving it any thought, we are suddenly cheerful, hopeful and optimistic, as Nature, Herself. And we are ready to spring forward into life with renewed energy and verve.

Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, award-winning author and popular speaker and workshop leader whose joyful celebrations of celestial events have introduced ancient traditional rituals and contemporary ceremonies to millions of people in more than one hundred cities for thirty-three years. She has published four books, a CD and an acclaimed journal. In addition to teaching and lecturing worldwide, Mama Donna, as she is affectionately called, maintains a ceremonial center, spirit shop, ritual practice and consultancy in exotic Brooklyn, NY where she works with individuals, groups, institutions, municipalities and corporations to create meaningful ceremonies for every imaginable occasion. http://www.donnahenes.net/

I think my friend Carolyn is being too shy. She's not telling the world that her latest novel, Temple of the Subway Goddess, is available as a free download over at her blog site right here. So I'm letting you know instead. Must-have summer reading!

Well, they say every picture tells a story but what's up with this? A few weeks ago, I posed for my friend Kris Waldherr's soon-to-be-released Doomed Queens book. Apparently, I was channeling forth Catherine of Aragon, the first of Henry VIII's wives who somehow managed to avoid getting the ax (so to speak) and was merely locked up in a dungeon for the rest of her days - or something like that. See, that pointy little hat that I'm wearing that looks like a house served as some kind of cosmic past life antenna and had me declaring a very queenly "Oy Vey!" Kris was really resourceful making that headgear, you know, applying a stapler so close to my head I didn't know what hit me - or didn't. Definitely a fun way to spend a Saturday!

 

Recently, I borrowed the book Shaman, Healer, Sage: How to Heal Yourself and Others with the Energy Medicine of the Americas by Alberto Villoldo, PhD from my local library.

As I was flipping through the book, deciding what chapters I wanted to read (I don't always read my books in a linear fashion), I stopped at a section called Power Animals.

I was drawn particularly to the one that discussed Jaguar energy.

Villoldo had this to say:

People generally change not when things are going right but when things are going wrong. Crisis, therefore, becomes a time of opportunity...I have grown to believe in the metaphor that we have nine lives, like cats. When we reach the end of one of these lifetimes (other people would call them stages or phases in one's life), it's important to give the old self a decent burial, and then leap like a jaguar into who we are becoming. Otherwise, we can spend years patching and fixing an old self we have outgrown.

How many people (perhaps yourself) hold on to an old way of being well past any reasonable signals that it is time to let go? There are those who even say they prefer the devil they know to the devil they don't! Yet, I have come to find there is enormous creative energy that makes itself available once you have truly made up your mind to start a new path. And remember, fortune favors the bold.

I recently did a lot of clearing in my own life, and it's led to some uncomfortably quiet situations. Whereas once in a constant state of busy-ness, pursuing a multitude of projects that I truly, deep-down did not want to be involved in, now I had disentangled myself from what were ultimately time-wasting activities  - only to not know what to do with the new chunks of time now made available! I know now not to just blindly jump in to new opportunities that present themselves, lest I find myself in the same situation as before. I will jump - like a jaguar (albeit perhaps like an uncoordinated jaguar!) - into new and well thought-out journeys, but only when I am ready.

In my last post, I spoke about being in a liminal place, a threshold between an old life and a new life. And frankly, being a little stunned by the overall quiet as I wait for my new self to unfold.

This reminded me of something I had read in The Second Half of Life by Angeles Arrien:

This shift often takes the form of abrupt, unexpected changes in our lives - such as a surprising new interest, a career change, a significant loss, divorce, or a move to a new location - in order to align with what truly touches our hearts and has meaning for us. With this shift comes an initial restlessness, irritability, anxiety, or discontent with our situation, and a deep questioning of the motivation surrounding our choices in career and relationships. Everything comes up for review.

I have enjoyed Ms. Arrien's books for years having, in fact, explored a great deal about the tarot from The Tarot Handbook, something that was recommended to me by another tarot reader when I was just starting out with my own readings years ago. Looking through The Second Half of Life, however, led to this startling discovery in the book jacket...

Separated at birth?

(Above) This is my friend Carolyn, who I am also always learning from.

(Above) And this is Angeles Arrien!

I would say that at the very least, they could be sisters. What do you think?

My latest discovery is what I've been calling my "Psychic Tea." It's Sacred Blend Tea from the Algonquin Tea Company. Sacred Blend is made up of sage, sweet grass, and white pine - and it's 100% organic. What the company says about the tea is this -

These three sacred herbs bless us with a healing sense of communion, tranquility and focus, for which these herbs are known by Native Americans.

I will also throw in that, for me anyway, this tea really brings out one's psychic abilities. I can't tell you some of the impressions I have had after drinking a cup! Recommended also for doing group rituals or just to get into an overall meditative state. Since these herbs are oftentimes used for smudging, drinking it to me is like a super-intense smudge.

The tea is also available at Mama Donna's Spirit Shop along with their Lucid Dreaming brand. I'll have to try that lucid dreaming next!

 

As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, I am currently reading Angeles Arrien's The Second Half of Life. The cycle of descent and ascent is discussed, as this is a theme that can be found within all spiritual traditions.

Many traditional and indigenous societies regard the Upper World as the place to receive guidance, blessings, and ecstatic experiences, and view the Lower World as the place to which one journeys to retrieve one's lost soul and bring it back for re-integration in the Middle World - this world. The process of descending and ascending is a universal human experience, where the heavens and hells in our nature are completely revealed.

I am reminded of a fascinating teleseminar I had downloaded a few weeks back, which featured Emily Hanlon discussing The Myth of the Descent of Inanna and the Powerful Journey of the Feminine. Inanna, a Sumerian goddess, travels to the underworld where she encounters seven gates (interestingly, Arrien's book's subtitle is "Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom.") At each of the seven gates, Inanna must give up another aspect of her persona until she is stripped bare of artifice, dies to her old self and ultimately undergoes a resurrection. "The myth of Inanna shows us how to go deeply into the dark and find the hidden gift of the suffering," says Hanlon - as ultimately it is in the dark where ideas can germinate and be reborn. Recommended listening, for sure.

 

What a nice weekend I had! Three days off from working. Yes, I know next weekend is the official Memorial Day three-day weekend. But I encountered a technical glitch that made it impossible for me to work on my project. That turned out to be a very nice break for me.

The first few months of this year were busy. Very busy, and yet when I look back, oddly stagnant at the same time. There was a huge sense of me spinning my wheels. Among many things that fell by the wayside because I couldn't find the time to do them were my book reviews. I felt like I had lost my focus.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes says to lose focus means to lose energy. You can probably guess which book this passage comes from:

The absolutely wrong thing to attempt when we've lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing is not the thing to do...sitting and rocking is the thing to do. Patience, peace, and rocking renew ideas...Take the idea and rock it to and fro. Keep some of it and throw some away, and it will renew itself. You need do no more.

So I read this weekend. And I did tarot readings for myself, too. I felt very restful, just like the way I felt when we were up at the country at our friend Jimmy's house, only I was here in the city and we hadn't gone anywhere at all. And a book review was written, just like that. Which I promptly sent to my editor. I told him he could expect more.

Baby steps, these are. But they are welcome signs of life, life after burnout.

I'm always surprised when a person hasn't heard of Squidoo. It's a great way to create a lens about something you're passionate about. A lens? Yes, that's a page. They are quick to put together. And it's free!

I just threw together a lens about my tarot reading. You can see it here. It tells a little story about how I came back to reading cards in a roundabout way.

Oh! And also why "What can I learn from this situation?" is a great question to pose to the cards.

Have fun Squidoo'ing!

 

I was listening to a physics lecture today and heard the most fascinating thing. The universe wants things to be stable. It wants things to be at their equilibrium.

Every time that you are unstable, the universe wants to correct it. It wants to go back to being stable. That's what it likes. It likes its own course to be very set. And that's the lowest energy course.

(The professor actually made a reference to the television series, Lost, and the idea of course-correction. Since I don't watch much television and have never seen the show, I don't know how and if that applies.)

However, I love the notion that things will only be unstable for so long and then it's the universe's natural way to stabilize them. If you can stay out of your own way. This is very hard for folks to do! I've seen that in others as well as myself.

What I like is the reference to the path of least resistance, which I believe is the lowest energy course. We hear so much about feeling passionate about your life and your work, being dynamic, to go for it! I've even heard that "if you're not scared enough, you're still in your comfort zone." I'm all for personal growth, but what's wrong with staying in your comfort zone? :)

 

What I like is the reference to the path of least resistance, which I believe is the lowest energy course. We hear so much about feeling passionate about your life and your work, being dynamic, to go for it! I've even heard that "if you're not scared enough, you're still in your comfort zone." I'm all for personal growth, but what's wrong with staying in your comfort zone? :)

I ended my last blog post with the above paragraph, and have found that these are the words that piss off life coaches everywhere. Well, not everywhere. But I got two - well, one and a half - spirited responses to this where I posted in one of my other blogs where I rarely get comments at all.

Apparently, saying it's okay to stay in your comfort zone is enough to threaten to topple the tenets of personal coaching in one single-handed swoop. At least it seems anathema to whatever the program it is that these personal cheerleaders have gotten with. Don't get me wrong - some of my good friends are coaches. It's just this scaring-yourself-business to keep reaching out of what must be perceived to be a dangerously nullifying "comfort zone" has gotten out of hand, in my opinion.

When a baby learns to walk, it obviously is moving beyond his or her comfort zone. However, I don't see terrifying itself as part of this. Determined to take steps, yes. Even happy. Let's move beyond this frankly weird idea of frightening yourself to achieve personal growth. Certainly, growth must take place more organically as well. There! - "organic growth." I like it!

 

Okay, I promise to lay off of personal coaches after this (I swear I don't have a vendetta against them and I really do have coach friends) but I received an email from one whose subject line was too bizarre to ignore. Without singling out who sent it, the subject line was "Do Not Be Realistic!" Now, call me quirky but I do like to reside in the Real World from time to time so I found this a bit disturbing.

When I read the email, I couldn't quite follow the logic but it was (a) geared towards women and (b) apparently seemed to employ the Law of Attraction to some degree. The example used was a financial one.

I don't see how we women sticking our collective heads in the sand about economics can do any good. There are sobering statistics out there - for example, these from the National Organization of Women.

In 2005, women's median annual earnings were only $.77 for every $1.00 earned by men. For women of color, the gap is even worse - only $.71 for African American women and $.58 for Latinas.

Which is just the tip of the iceberg. I guess the opposite of "realistic" is fantasy. Women, please don't live in a fantasy world about something this important! Wishing will not make you rich, unless you have some fabulous lottery karma or something. One excellent resource for women and money I've found is Money Order: The Money Management Guide for Women.