So the last year has been one of endless transition for me. Between changing my work, moving, undergoing initiations, and having another child, it’s been quite a ride. The hardest part for me in all of these changes was not the work, or the actual change, it was that point of weightlessness in between being here and there – being in transition. And I have one thing to say about being in transition – it SUCKS! Okay, ranting done.

In the Tarot there are many cards that talk about change but there is one that stands out as being caught in that moment in between states – the princess of Disks. She is, in my reckoning, the last card in the deck. She sits there at the end awaiting the rebirth of the cycle in the return to the fool. In her hands is a large disk with a Yin Yang on it. If it was not so organic-looking it might seem to be a shield. This disk is the seed of what is to come. Everything in this card is about potential.

Timing is everything!

When the Princess of Disks surfaces in a reading her advice is simple - wait. Wait to find out if you got the job, wait for the child to arrive, wait to see if this person is the one. Just wait.

What do you do if you have this kind of time to kill? I don’t mean an hour or a day, but a month or a season? In fact what do you do while you are waiting for the rest of your life to move ahead. It is pretty common these days to just try to work harder, faster, and smarter to get there more quickly. But when the princess of disks shows up its not about the amount of effort exerted, so much as the passing of the hours on the clock.

During my year of transition I spent time going back and forth between angsting about reaching the end and turning my attention to things that were immediate. One of the biggest things I did this year was to become a better cook. You may notice this was not on the initial list, and this is because it was not a goal, but something I found a lot of joy in that passed the time.

The other thing that the disk looks like to me is a life preserver. Being in transition can certainly feel like you are lost at sea, waiting to find land, or be discovered. What can you grab a hold of to keep you afloat during this time?

Surviving Transition Spread
This spread is really geared to keeping you in the now and preventing despair from setting in during periods of transition. So draw three cards and lay them in a row.

1. Pastime – This card is here to suggest what you can do to keep busy, to divert your attention and to refresh you. Don’t look to the meaning of this card so much as to the images on it. If there are trees – get outside. If there are people being active – join a gym. If it’s about knowledge - read a book.
2. Are we there yet? Ok we all have an internal little kid that gets bored with a long journey. Think of this card as the new toy, treat or game that will help in those moments when the end feels far away. Look for something distracting in the card. My 2 year old gets a handful of gummy bears sometimes to help her move through the gap from one place and another, say the playground and the house. It helps with the momentary emotion and allows for easier transitions.
3. Confidence booster. Being in the space between often evokes insecurities. In this card look for some piece of wisdom to hold on to, to be your touch stone during the times when all seems lost or pointless.

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For years when I started walking my path, I felt that if I did not do spiritual things every day I was not fulfilling my end of the bargain. In looking back over my journals from those early years I find frequent comments about how little I was doing. It was not until I started to use a more graph like system to track my work that I realized how much I was actually doing.

In retrospect I can also see now how some of the activities I was doing were perhaps good spiritually, but were damaging to other areas of my life - I spent too much money, I neglected relationships - to name a few. If I approached work the way I approached my spiritual life people would have said I was a workaholic. Today if we talk about work life balance most people get it – but this wisdom should be applied to our spiritual path too!

I always found the monastic kind of life appealing. To be the Hermit, living away from the world communing with spirit sounded like a sweet deal to me. What I found challenging, was not in connecting with spirit, but in bringing that connection into the world. It is the ability to sustain and nurture that connection and insulate it against the challenges of daily life that I have found the hardest.

I think that there are many ways in which spirit and daily life can be balanced, but to me the 4 of disks holds the answers. If you look at the image on this card in the deck of Thoth, it is a castle. It is a card of establishing order to promote sustainability. This card is not about static structure it is about dynamic order. The 4 points, or turrets, are given to the elements – Fire, Water, Air and Earth. These elements are in turn given to different aspects of our lives. Fire is spirit, Water to emotions, Air the mind and Earth our bodies and material needs. The lesson of this card is that if any one piece goes out of synch all might be lost.

As far as lessons go “making sure you take care of the different aspects of your life” is pretty simple. However, the reality is that its pretty hard to do – that is why a dynamic order, not a static one is needed. Visually it is easy to see that the cycle just restarts when we get to the end, in fact there is no end – it just starts up again.

Building a sustainable life and walking your path.
This process is designed to help highlight where there is imbalance in your life and to diagnose what can be done to help correct the imbalance. To get the most out of this don’t look for a cure, or permanent solution, but reassess on a regular basis in order to keep things on track.

Step 1
Put out four cards - 1 for each of the corners of the castle. If you start in the upper right and go counter clockwise you have Fire, Water, Air and Earth.

Start by looking at each card individually. Which position, or element’s card is strong and vibrant? Which blocked or out of control? Generally, problem cards carry their own suggestion as to the solution, for instance:
5 of wands, strife, would suggest conflict in your self, or that area of your life
5 of cups, worry, suggests that fear is getting in the way
8 of swords, interference, suggests looking at what outside force is getting in the way
7 of disks, failure, is a dead end and suggests starting over

Now assess the balance of the 4 cards. Does one area stand out? Before getting to heady about it ask yourself if there is an obvious solution. Is there time and energy going into that area? Will it take time to develop? And so on. Often, just having issue highlighted, will help solve the problem. If you got your answer skip to step 3.

Step 2
If there is no obvious answer then place another card by the position(s) that are not going well to provide a solution. Whatever the card that falls, look for an action in it, for example:
8 of cups, indolence, which often talks about laziness in this case might suggest a break
8 of wands, swiftness, brings up communication as important
6 of disks, success, says money might help
4 of swords, truce, says accepting what can’t be changed, at least right now, is important

At this point you should have an idea of the problem and what will fix it.

Step 3
Finally, it can be helpful to look at the flow in the initial pattern of four cards. How well do they relate to each other? Do they support each other? Life is an interwoven web where no part can truly stand alone. If all four cards are positive, cool! You are doing great. If one area, or suit stands out, ask it to find its way back into alignment. If you don’t know what to do bring order place one last card in the center to speak to what will unify the whole pattern.

The power of using this process comes from repeated use. By coming back to it month after month, season after season, deep patterns will emerge and further accelerate your growth and journey on the wandering path. http://www.thehermitslamp.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

In the next post we’ll look at dabbling as an integral part of the journey and potential pitfall too!

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Is my truth ‘Truth’?
Now you might be thinking to yourself “but there are times to be honest with people regardless of whether it is comfortable or not”. That compassion and friendship might demand we tell an uncomfortable Truth to someone. Of course there are.

I think that the first question is to ask yourself what kind of permission you have from this person. Do they tell you the truth; have they asked you to do the same? If you have talked about honesty with this person you could assume that you have more permission to bring up difficult topics. If you haven’t talked about honesty with them you might want to before launching into touchy subjects.

The Tower card speaks to me of the dangers you might find along this road. The Tower card is shown being struck by lightning and collapsing, casting out the people who were inside. It is a volatile and fiery card that speaks of the dangers of pride and the breaking down of the ego.

Now telling others what you think is true about them is always a complicated thing. When I have this urge I like to ask myself ‘to what end?’ Is it to help them? To help me? To vent frustration or what? If I find the motivation behind my desire points back to me I try and sort out what I actually need to say. This is a time to go back to using language that owns my experience and stay away from statements about others, especially ones that point the finger towards their failings.

Still there are times when we see something that another person might not see. The question to think about next is what will they get out of having their illusion removed and with what will I give them to replace it. We all have our crutches that we rely on to allow us to get through our lives. Having them removed by others’ words can create a whole spiral that might as easily take a person into despair as encourage them to grow. A good rule of thumb here is that unless you are sure you can replace their crutch with something better leave it alone.

If you look at Crowley’s Tower card a flaming mouth seems to knock the Tower down with its flames. Our mouths and especially our words can build and inspire as much as they can destroy. Sit with your Tower card and meditate on the times that others have shaken your faith in yourself with their words. For those ready to do some deeper deconstruction you might want to also meditate of what faulty blocks might be built into your tower.

Let me end with my favourite quote on friendship from Norman Douglas. “To find a friend one must close one eye - to keep him, two.”

Truth and others
Justice is blind. I find the image of Justice blindfolded is the most honest dispenser of truth. She cannot use her sight to discern the truth but instead must evaluate the information available and render her verdict from there. It illustrates the challenges in being honest with others. The Justice card is given the sign of Libra and represents the balance between Venus and Saturn or Love and Limitation.

I had a client recently bring up their desire to be more honest with the people around them. We spent some time talking about what they meant by that and it came out there were a couple of hidden desires at play. The first was a desire to tell people what this client really felt about them and their actions. The unspoken goal behind this desire to speak ‘honestly’ here was to encourage the people involved to be more in line with what my client wanted them to be like. The tone of the conversation also carried with it the idea that a more accurate way to describe the telling of truth being addressed is ‘brutal honesty.’ My experience of this kind of honesty is that when leveled against those around us it is usually very damaging. The banner of brutal honesty functions to give permission for al kinds of criticism, which usually are untempered by compassion. I know when people start to lay all my faults out in front of me it is rare that I take up that challenge with grace. Instead I, like most people, either withdraw or react in kind.

Criticisms leveled at others under the guise of honesty speak to the Saturnian side of the Justice card. Saturn governs that side of Justice that is can be too cold, calculating or driven by the rules. It is not a question of whether these attempts at honesty are true or not that determines their success it’s the motivation. When we speak without kindness and compassion we can rest assured that it is not the other persons best interests we have in mind but our own.

The second desire of my client was to feel more connected with those around them. The hoped for impact of speaking the truth was not generally to push everyone away, though it might accomplish just that. It was to make people be more able to fulfill the need of my client. It was a call for Love and connection with others. In fact you might say that this person was reaching out looking for others to see their Truth and to interact with them around what was truest and most core to them.

Here we have the other side of the Justice card playing out – the side governed by Venus. We all crave love and connection with others. Being seen by others is often both a desire and a fear. We want to be appreciated yet we fear rejection.

In the Justice card we have two polarities playing out against each other creating the balance. Grab your Justice card and meditate on the fine point of balance found in this card. Keep in mind that if someone tells us only things to make us feel good we know on some level that it is not true and if someone only blasts us with the Truth we won’t stay around too long.

I thought that Truth and Honesty would be a great subject for my first series of posts on my blog. It is not my intention that this blog become a space to flog merchandise, yet I found myself so inspired by this subject I have also created a powdered incense blend to go with it. This incense is a blend of star anise, lavender and storax. It is a great blend for self-reflection and to aid in speaking your truth into the world.

I have always liked the word Truth. You know with a big old capital T at the front of it. In many ways my path can be summed up as a search for Truth. Not just transitory truths but eternal ones. I have found Truths about myself, my role on earth, about others and about the nature of the universe. These Truths are often more feelings and experiences than they are concrete things I could put into words.

In order to find Truth I think we have to be honest – mostly with ourselves but also with others. Now as you likely know I make my living by telling others the Truth that I see in the cards. What I am talking about here is not about the places in our lives where we might be called on professionally to speak the Truth. I am looking at the much hazier world of daily interpersonal interactions and in the shadowy corners of our own minds and hearts.

Truth in the Tarot comes up in many places. There is the stark Truth of the Justice card, the Truth of Self-Knowledge in the Magician, the Seeking of Truth in the Hermit, and the destructive Truth of the lightning strike in the Tower.

True to self
The Magician is said to have the ability to manifest what he intends by virtue of his self-knowledge. It is by understanding who he is, that he has power in the world. The Truth in the Magician is an inward not an outward one. The Magician uses truth and illusion to accomplish his ends yet never loses his authenticity in the trade.

It is a human condition to seek to be seen by others in a good light. For many people though having their truth be seen is a whole other question. I am often asked if I have people I can’t read and the answer is that some people are harder than others. Generally speaking the people who are hard to read want to be hard to read either due to fear of what might be seen in them or their futures. Face it we all have secrets that we would rather not have brought to the forefront or worse still shown to the world. I think that if all of the niceties and masks in the world were dropped at once chaos would ensue. The lesson in the Magician here is to not fool ourselves while playing slight of hand with the world.

It is fascinating to me to think that the Magician does not care if he is seen correctly but instead that he manifests what he needs. This may seem like dishonesty at first glance but the Magician is not a liar. The challenge for the Magician is that he ends up believing his own hype and loses his connection to his own Truth.

One of the problems that the Magician cannot solve on his own is the danger of losing himself in the material world. In fact the answer to this loss of inner connection can’t be easily found in the world at all. To correct this problem the Magician must withdraw and seek the light or Truth within himself or more to the point become the Hermit for a period of time. This is the defense against the shadows and vagarities of the world of human interaction. Meditate, pray; turn your sight inwards to find your own touchstone of truth.

Pull the Magician and the Hermit from your deck and sit with them asking gently to find your truth as you gaze on them.