The cups will fill again and the storm will pass. Feel the pain, and keep one foot on solid ground.
The Fountain Tarot, Five of Cups
A Quiet Writing deep-dive Tarot Narrative each Monday to share intuitive guidance, wisdom and insights from aligned books – for the week and anytime…
This week: essential matters + feeling your way through pain
Theme for the week beginning 16 April
The underlying theme for this week to guide our overall focus is from Lisa McLoughlin’s Life Design Cards deck – #44 Make those essential actions matter.
This week is about essential matters of life and of the heart and remembering what really matters. In this, we might be feeling pain and turmoil, but it’s a time of washing away the inessential.
Often the toughest and most painful of circumstances remind us of essential matters to focus on. We need to take the time to breathe through them and learn from them, as hard as this can be.
Advice from the Life Design Cards Guidebook is:
Let nothing be hidden behind walls of fear. Try to feel what you want to do right now. Clarify your priorities as if every minute matters.
Certainly, the more painful the time, the more we realize that indeed every moment does matter. The gift of challenge is to sharpen our awareness and help us identify what is essential and what is not essential.
This week’s guidance is about experiencing the pain and full feelings of challenging situations so we can learn from them. We are reminded to tap into the power of instinct and intuition as we move through difficult times. It’s as if we need to feel our way in the true sense of this phrase, letting feelings be our guide. This might mean going through pain and upheaval to get to the other side. Being grounded and learning as we move through is key.
Tarot Narrative for the week beginning 16 April
Tarot Narrative:
Change is often painful, it’s true. Spilt cups, falling towers, grey skies, stepping between worlds. It all points to the loss and transformation of something, life becoming different in essential ways. You can lose yourself in this loss, focusing on what is spilt, becoming paralysed. Or you can step into the dark clouds and feel them, know their energy and know too that the blue sky and calmer times will come again.
Reading notes:
Cards: Five of Cups and The Tower from The Fountain Tarot and #3 Between Worlds from Wisdom of the Oracle.
Book notes:
You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.
Pema Chödrön
via Rick Hanson’s
Resilient: 12 Tools for transforming everyday experiences into lasting happiness
What a fabulous quote from Pema Chodron and what an amazing book ‘Resilient’ is. I have listened to it as an audiobook the past few weeks as I have driven in and out of my little village. I’m facing challenging times yet again after supporting my mother through her terminal illness last year. In the final stages of my mother’s life, as I drove in and out of town to the hospital, I focused on the essential as I listened to Greg McKeown’s Essentialism.
Both books sing of essential matters, moving through the inessential and gaining clarity. Tough and painful times sometimes simply have to be moved through. But feeling the pain and learning from these times gifts us with powerful lessons we can take forward. We develop psychological resources we can gather if from dark clouds, to face difficult times with grace and strength.
Dark clouds and what they teach us
If there’s one thing you notice from each of the three cards for this week’s tarot narrative, it’s the prevalence of dark clouds.
The Five of Cups reminds us that it’s helpful to feel any pain and loss fully as we move through it. If we don’t, we can miss valuable lessons. It is as if we need to feel the pain to move through it. ‘Befriending Grief’, as the Fountain Tarot interpretation puts it, can be a source of moving through any loss.
The Tower can be a fearful card to pull with its top-heavy energy drawing things down. It reminds us of the pain of moving through change. But as the Fountain Tarot reminds us, it can be about ‘The Inessential Destroyed’ and getting through to what matters.
Between Worlds reminds us:
What is essential now is to admit not knowing. There is great freedom and power to be unleashed.
All of these cards especially in the light of our theme card, “Make those essential actions matter”, bring us into the realm of clear, essential, resilient actions.
We can focus on the dark clouds or we can focus on the light coming through.
The photograph above was taken this evening as dark smoke fills the sky from bushfires not so far away. It’s been a sobering time lately in many respects and my thoughts have been with those battling the fires and trying to keep their homes and loved ones safe. The fight is not over. But whatever we are battling, light and optimism will help shine out the dark and keep us focused, even if we must acknowledge the challenges at hand in very real terms.
Essential matters and resilient practices
I shared some learnings from my reading of ‘Resilient’ last week in my post, Creative healing in times of sorrow and challenge. This week’s focus on essential matters continues this theme and highlights these practices.
The two practices prompted by reading ‘Resilient’ that have helped me the most these past few weeks have been:
1 Honouring my psychological resources
Sadly, I have been through a lot of pain, challenge and loss in my life. On one side, I can focus on this and let it get me down. Or I can see that I have had the opportunity to build psychological resources to be more resilient and strong.
Everything we go through teaches us if we are open to the lessons. At times, I have had to dig deep and be reflective, talk to special friends and professionals. I’ve learnt to know when to spend time alone, when to practice self-care and how to balance my needs with others. Tough lessons all and with more challenges stretching me, I can dig into my learning and bring all of myself to bear to get through. For example, I am much better at contacting people and talking when I need it now rather than battling on alone.
2 Feeling the beauty in small everyday joys as well as feeling pain
A big learning over time for me has been that it is okay to feel the beauty and joy of everyday things – the full cups – even as we feel immense pain.
We can tend to make it an either/or, saying to ourselves either I feel grief or I feel joy. I cannot feel both. It can feel like a terrible tension or betrayal of the feeling of pain if we feel good in any way.
Rick Hanson reminds us we can take an approach of gratitude:
Thankfulness is not about minimizing or denying hassles, illness, loss, or injustice. It is simply about appreciating what is also true: such as flowers and sunlight, paper clips and fresh water, the kindness of others, easy access to knowledge and wisdom, and light at the flick of a switch.
I have found special joy in swimming, reading, writing, sitting in the sun, cups of tea, coffee and connection with special friends and family at this time. The simple act of getting these tarot narratives out each week is a blessing and wisdom I learn from.
What are your essential resilient practices?
So take some time to identify your essential matters and resilient practices:
- Where are you feeling pain and can you acknowledge it for what is?
- What beautiful and special things have you enjoyed or witnessed lately?
- How can this light you up even if feeling pain?
- Where have you felt darkness descend and why?
- What have you focused on or done to take you there into that darkness?
- When have you lightened up and what helped you to do that?
- What psychological resources have you developed over time and how can you honour this and build on them?
Take a moment to list:
- Your psychological resources, learning and supports and what helps you get through
- The blessings and joys that bring light into your life even if there are still dark clouds and if only for a brief moment.
This is a great week for honouring our psychological strengths, appreciating any pain and blessings and getting to the essential matters of life.
Love to hear your thoughts!
I’d love to hear what is working for you as you reflect on the essential matters of life.
All best wishes for this week of being clear on the essential, removing the inessential and developing resilient practices.
May you find strength and resilience in the clarity and peace of essential matters. And let me know what you think of this post and this weekly Tarot Narrative!
Keep in touch & free ebook on the ’36 Books that Shaped my Story’
You can work with me to help tap into that inner wisdom and magic guidance. Free 30-45 minute coaching consults chats are available in April for a May coaching start so please get in touch at terri@quietwriting.com to talk further. I’d love to be a guide alongside to help you conduct creativity and magic with spirit and heart in your own unique way.
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