The white man is losing his mind

I’m driving with Lisa back from Maine. We’ve just spent a few glorious days fishing in the Sandy River on her mother’s property, collecting eggs for breakfast from the chickens, eating potatoes dug up from the earth. It was glorious.

We’re talking about how many men we know are losing it right now. White men. Severe depression. Physical illness. Clinical madness. The white man is going cuckoo for cocoa puffs.

I say: “The white man is losing his mind and it’s a good thing.”

Lisa believes it has something to do with Barak Obama being in power. What kind of deep challenge is it to the whole white male paradigm when a black man becomes the leader?

We both agree it has something to do with the financial crisis, where men who are used to providing have lost the power to do so. Who are they now? Truly, who am I if I cannot own the label of Provider?

I think it all has to do with a redressing of the balance of the divine feminine. The extreme male paradigm cannot continue without destroying the world. We need feminine balance. And it will happen. It is happening. Because we’re all so unconscious in it, it has to happen the hard way. Knock down. Drag out. But the results are the same — an equalizing.

Lisa has worry and compassion for the suffering white man, but I think their depression is GLORIOUS. A glorious paradigm shift. Every time I’ve grown spiritually it was because something I thought was important was taken away from me and I was forced deep into myself to discover who I really was.

I became an artist and a writer because of those severe illnesses and depressions brought on by external events that refused to support what my ego wanted.

So, if the white man looks out into the world and can no longer see reflected back his own white power. If he opens his eyes to a world where he has no ability to provide for his family, maybe, just maybe, he’ll come around to seeing himself as a fragile human being. As a person. Maybe hardship will help him see himself as an equal with all of us who have known a great deal of hardship, people of color, women. Maybe he will see he is not better. That he is not responsible for everything financially. That he has a soul that wants expression outside of the straightjacket expectations that society puts on men — a straightjacket that I think makes the white man so enraged and that’s why he acts so badly.

I say: Bring on the depression and illness. Maybe the world will be a better place. The white man is losing his mind. Maybe, sometimes, a mind is a wonderful thing to lose.

A tarot reading can help you make sense of the madness. They start as low as $50 for half an hour. www.creativetarot.com/email: carolineallen@aol.com

Earth on Fire

London Reflections, Tree reflected in puddle at Southbank, 2007www.carolineallen.com

I use tarot in this blog to channel information on global issues, such as the current financial and environmental crises. Today I speak about a shamanic journey and do not use the cards.

My first novel is called Earth and I just recently signed with New York literary agent Jon Sternfeld of the Irene Goodman Agency.

I channeled a lot of information in writing the novel. I use my abilities as a channeler in all my art, channeling spirit through color on canvas, channeling characters onto the page as a novelist.

Besides tarot, I’m a shamanic practitioner. A few years ago, I did a shamanic journey to ask about the themes of the novel. A shamanic journey, for those who don’t know, is a more spiritually powerful version of a creative visualization.

In the journey, I was propelled upward into the universe, among the stars, and was brought to rest upon the Moon. I met a spirit guide there, a woman in cobalt blue with a face of ivory or ice. She said: Look down at the Earth. What do you see?

I saw huge fires burning in about two dozen places all around the globe, one area I knew to be Afghanistan. The US invasion after September 11th had ended a year or so earlier.

But some were areas that did not have wars going on, areas of starvation or deforestation. I felt like sobbing. I asked her: What exactly are you trying to tell me?

She said: The earth places, anywhere where people are close to the earth, are being destroyed. The current paradigm requires that all things earth-related be destroyed. This causes worldwide deep primal rage. Everyone is so enraged. This is what your book is about.

Later, I would ponder all of this and come to understand that if we see that the earth is being beaten up, even if we’re not seeing this consciously but picking up on it in some unconscious way, we fear the organic sides of ourselves and we shut them down. It all results in massive global low self esteem, as we feel shamed for our true selves. Why? Why kill the earth? Why make us all so fucked up? Because we’re confused. We think success is owning a bigger house or car. And how can they sell us these bigger houses and cars if we know in our bellies that true abundance is the earth? They can’t, so they must at the very least confuse us, and at the very worst destroy the earth, destroy the truth.

Who are ‘they’? You are. I am. We’re all ‘they’.

Sitting on the Moon among the stars, watching the Earth burn below me, I was overcome with a profound grief. The feeling has never left me. I knew that my novel Earth was about my childhood on a farm, but I was learning it was also about the entire world. It was about the loss of the earth and the loss of our organic selves. It was about rage, and rampant addiction and clinical depression on a global scale.

I recently watched the documentary The Gathering – Return of the Whale Dreamers produced by Julian Lennon (John’s son). An aboriginal tribe in Australia invited aboriginal peoples from all over the world to their area. Rituals were held, whales showed up in the nearby bay. It was a profound film. What affected me the most was seeing all of these tribal peoples in one place. The oppressed, the wrecked, the overwhelmed — a motley motley group of people.

I thought: These people look like the devastated earth. Their devastated faces and misshapen boddies are the very echo of the earth. Their addictions, everything.

I truly do not mean to dis them. What I’m trying to say is this. I don’t trust people in this world who look fit and clean and happy. They disturb me. What kind of bubble do they have to create for themselves to block out the wail of a dying earth? How they judge the addicted and the depressed, the very people who are truly feeling the keening of a bruised and bloodied earth.

I trust the downtrodden. I trust the depressed. I trust the dark eyed, overwhelmed, embittered lovers of trees, of roots, of ocean depths. I trust those who can barely get out of bed in the morning. I trust those who are as bruised as this blessed earth. Those who do not pretend…

I am a tarot reader. Contact me if you’d like a reading. www.creativetarot.com

The Metaphysical Conundrum

Doodle, www.carolineallen.com

In this blog, I use tarot to explore global issues affecting the world today, including the financial and environmental crises.

I am upping my tarot business, and it’s taken off magically, and I’m again reading for clients all over the world. The consequence of reading so much tarot is that I spend the majority of my week in the realm of spirit.

How hard it is to come down and deal with the mundane world. How hard it is to live with a woman screaming out her car window and flipping someone off (and you should’ve seen the OTHER driver), when you’ve just danced amid the stars, visioned the soul of another, seen the glory to which our spirits can soar.

When we do spiritual work of any kind, it becomes more and more difficult to tolerate the average person doing average bad behavior. We’re in tune with the universe and we want to yell Oh for God sake act your spiritual age! Or worse, we want to pity the poor fool for not being as sprititually enlightened as we are.

I call this the Metaphysical Conundrum. How do we bridge the two worlds with real grace, without coming off as spiritually materialistic judgmental jerks? I decided to do a reading about it.

The reading says that I’m misunderstanding true Spiritual Love. Spiritual love isn’t just seeing the highest good in the person and expecting that highest good. True spiritual love is much more dynamic, much sexier, much naughtier than that. The Devil fits into true spiritual love. Be expansive enough to allow more types of behavior without judgement.

The reading also says that when we cannot take others’ behavior, because it’s just plain mindblowingly stupid, and there’s nothing at all sexy about it, to pull in all that godly energy, and solidify your boundaries, and know that the other’s behavior has nothing to do with you. It’s their path.

Also, any fool can channel spirit. Because we channel, it doesn’t mean we’re spiritually enlightened. It does mean we get brownie points in heaven (I just made that up, the reading doesn’t say the brownie points part) because we’re helping others spriitually. It does say by channelling we invite spirit it into our souls and that is SO healing for us, but don’t mistake that for being more enlightened. We all have our personal issues to explore and heal.

What to do, though, with all that beautiful spiritual energy coursing through? It needs expression, the reading says. Through art and writing, through dance and singing. You recycle spirit and refill the world with spirit through your art.

Pull your energy of annoyance back, apply it to a canvas, to a piano (play the blues, baby), to the wall of a building. Don’t waste it on a driver who cuts you off, use it to drive your own art forward.

If you’d like a reading, contact me at carolineallen@aol.com. My Tarot website: www.creativetarot.com
For fiction and visual art: www.carolineallen.com
I’m also a Writing Coaching: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

Cards chosen for this reading: Ten of Wands reversed, Sage of Crystals, Two of Crystals reversed, Sage of Wands, Three of Cups reversed, Universe, Three of Crystals, Chariot, Art

We’re all in this together

In this blog, I use the tarot to explore issues arising around the global financial and environmental crises

Part 1 of the reading
I recently lost a part-time job working with teens in an art program in Lowell, Ma. It provided about one-third of my income, and I subsequently lost my art studio. It all happened within a week.

Because the administrators at the job for teens didn’t want to hurt my feelings, they didn’t tell me I wouldn’t be working through the summer. They did a budget and realized they couldn’t afford to take me on but they were afraid to tell me. I only found out when I emailed to ask about the start date of the new summer schedule.

We’re all in this together. We MUST take care of each other here. We must speak honestly to each other about our finances, about job situations, about the rent we owe our landlords. We must. There is no way to handle these difficult times without honest and open communications.

I know my employers were going through a hard time. I know other employees there are scared of losing their work. I can be graceful enough to understand that they are scared, too. But I can also be upset with the lack of courage many are showing in this time of crisis. Be honest. Allow others the power they need to manage their own lives. Don’t think only about your own butt. Think about each person you work with, each client, and try to put yourself in their shoes. Be compassionate. Be fair.

The person leaving employment loses much more than money. They often lose the work friendships that go along with it, the joy of doing the work, the regular schedule that kept them sane. It’s OK to mourn this. The more you clearly and actively pinpoint what is upsetting you and you deal with it direclty, the less the grief will own you.

Part 2 of the reading
Our cores selves are so tied up in our jobs and in making money. How knocked down we feel when those are taken away. We have gorgeous children, or tremendous friends and we still think we are nothing because we have no money.

What power we could have if we tied value to our souls. What power we could have no matter what happened in the world if we felt we were worthy even if we had no cash. What authentic power we’d possess if we took all that energy and used it for meditation or reading profound spiritual works of literature, or doing rituals. What power we already have.

Most money triggers for all of us go way way back, down the paths of generations. We can study these by studying our parents’ relationship to money. Don’t look at it in black and white, they were poor and feared starving, is just one level of this. Ask yourself: How did they save money? What extras did they spend it on? What did they think of artists? What or who did they mock or disparage because of money?

It’s a way to begin untangling our social conditioning around money, and to find our healthy, pure and beautiful soul-self amidst the chaos. We’re going to have to go through these shifts no matter what. How we handle them — with fear or grace — is profoundly up to us.

I am a tarot reader: www.creativetarot.com

Tarot cards for this reading were:
Page of Swords, Ace of cups reversed, Emperor, King of Coins reversed, Three of coins reversed, Five of coins, Ace of rods reversed, Nine of swords, Four of swords, Seven of cups, Page of rods.

Authentic Connection

In this blog, I use the tarot to ask for deep insights into the global financial and environmental crises.

With the financial crisis, we’re all feeling fear about money and security. This can cause us to disconnect from our authentic selves and other people, at the very time we need our authenticity and our connections more than ever.

There are so many ways fear makes us disconnect. We hear a call to follow a spiritual path, but the call has come at a difficult time. The call isn’t about making money, about finding a job, about balancing the budget, about frantically worrying about our future, so we ignore it out of fear. At the very time that our spiritual health could serve us, we’re too fearful to follow it.

In difficult situations, most of us know how to come from a big-souled place. But because we’re all so scared of our money troubles, we get petty and bitchy. At the very time the world needs people to be large souled, to be graceful, we surrender to fear and act like jerks.

We grow scared and depressed and we don’t just disconnect from ourselves, from our beautiful souls, we disconnect from other people because we can’t deal with their fear and pain.

What is the way to deal with this?

Every day, connect. With yourself. With others. Set aside some time to meditate, to connect to spirit, to do something you love that has nothing to do with money. Paint, take photos, dance, walk in the woods. Shift the focus of your energy from fear and disconnection, to love and connection.

Email or call friends and tell them you’re thinking about them. Sit with their pain and listen. We all just need someone who’ll listen to us. This is a message for the world. We all need to pull ourselves together and act from our hightest spiritual self. It’s the only way through all this.

I’m an artist and writer, www.carolineallen.com, and an intuitive healer, www.creativetarot.com

The Great Divide

High Priestess, part of the Tarot Series, acrylic on canvas. www.carolineallen.com

I’ve felt this strange and intense dichotomy lately. On one hand, spiritually and creatively, life could not be better. On the other, too many people are coming up and directly opposing me. I’m not even directing myself to them or thinking about them, but somehow my ‘being’ is upsetting them.

If you’re a sensitive artist like I am, this is the biggest challenge of fully living your spiritual/creative path — how other people react.

I discussed this in a session with my metaphysical counselor in Seattle Judith Laxer (www.JudithLaxer.com). I told her that while some people, those on a spiritual path, are emailing and we’re deeply reconnecting, others are throwing me off my game with their intense negativity.

She said: “That’s when I know I’m in right livelihood, when people are reacting that way.”

She went on to speak about the Great Divide. With the economic and environmental crises, there’s an ever widening gap between those on a spiritual path, and those living in normal ego. Those of us who see these crises as a chance to develop more spiritually aren’t having as many issues. Those who see through the eyes of fear and grab at external objects and status (as if these could ever give them real security) are having a very difficult time.

The divide has to do with the imbalance in the world between masculine and feminine. The masculine archetype is about action, the feminine about intuition and contemplation. I believe we’ve taken enough action, way too much action, and now we need to stop and reconsider and connect to the earth.

I’m very interested in connecting to the divine feminine and helping others do that too. That’s what I do as a writing coach and tarot reader.

One idea that’s haunting me is the Salem Witch Hunts. I live not far from Salem and have studied the trials and such for the last six months. What’s really fascinating to me is that the witch hunt isn’t over. There is a Modern Witch Hunt…against women in their intuitive power in today’s world. I know the West Coast of the US is more open to intutitive powers, but elsewhere, and in Puritanical New England, women are shamed and held low. The ‘normal world’ puts the psychic arena and those who participate in it off to the side, as if it weren’t an incredibly powerful, transformational tool. How much more we need our connection to the spirit guides with all these crises — and still people poo poo it. It’s mind boggling.

A lot of my women friends have gone through major spiritual paradigm shifts over the past five years. As they get closer to the truth of who they are, as they get closer to their core power, they find they come up against so many past put-downs, and so much negativity in the present. It’s as if the normal world has been systematically taught that anything intuitive or feminine is wrong, well, it’s OK if you keep it at home like a good little woman, but to think it will be respected outside of that bubble? Well, let’s just put it this way, the women artists and healers you see and know do not have it easy. We face a scorching wind, and to do our work, we still must keep our self esteem in high working order.

Let me give an example. Even in the art world here, there’s a great divide between realistic art painted in the standardized style and abstract art. I know, it’s shocking. I’m shocked by it daily — how there’s still this notion that realistic art is better. Are we in the late 1800s here aesthetically? So, artists who explore themselves deeply and uncover an eccentric style find both that they are shaky with this new found power and they are up against more than they realize.

Judith told me that this is the whole reason I’m living in New England. To teach the metaphysical by living it, by having it inform my visual art and my fiction. I think I’ll teach a workshop on being in our witchy intuitive power as women.

What can we all do to up the ante on empowering the divine feminine? The world really needs us now.

Trust

Skaters in Yerevan, www.carolineallen.com

What I find fascinating with crises such as the financial and environmental issues affecting the world, is how much they invoke contemplation of big life themes: Fear, Anger, Trust, Judgment, Soul, Spirit, Self Esteem. Many of these are represented in the archetypes of the tarot. This is the big benefit of crises: they force us to face and deepen our connection with life’s universals.

I’m standing with a friend at my kitchen window. The vista outside is epic. I live on a river, and all three kitchen windows give a smokey blue vista of moody sky and dynamic current. One one side, over a rail bridge, I watch the sunrise. Out the opposite window, where the river bends in the distance, I watch the sunset. Often the kitchen turns purple, orange and red with the waning day, with the waning sun.

The friend says: “Is that a hawk? Wow, look at that. This is such a gorgeous view.”

I adore the view too. But, I have a ramshackle apartment, scruffy and funky and old. It’s long and thin, and the front of the apartment, the living room, is above a noisy street of streaming cars.

I say: “Yes, it’s a fantastic view but man does the traffic off the living room drive me insane!”

“No, no, no,” he says. “Just pay attention to this view. Don’t moan about the traffic.”

I look at him. I cannot disagree enough with this philosophy. “You can’t just ignore the bad stuff in life. You have to recognize it as much as you recognize the epic.”

He doesn’t answer. I know he is ‘clinically’ depressed and I think: part of the problem is you think you can push down and ignore the bad stuff. (Of course, I also understand that some depression isn’t this easy to define…but I think this friend does try to hide his ‘bad’ feelings and it would help him if he allowed himself to trust and acknowledge his ‘bad’ feelings.) As Eckhart Tolle says in The New Earth, just don’t ATTACH to the bad stuff.

In one moment, I can view an epic vista and in the next be annoyed with some hooha pounding ABBA from his car stereo a few stories below me on the street.

Acknowledge, be in the moment with what annoys you, but don’t attach to it. Acknowledge and let it go. I do not say this lightly. I know some people have really horrible things in their past that are difficult to acknowledge and let go of. Believe me, I have personal experience with this myself. And I STILL believe passionately we cannot push it down. It doesn’t work.

I believe that this subject is important right now because denial of what’s happening in the world is NOT the answer. Going into a happy place, retreating into a bubble, cannot help anyone, including yourself.

We must look at and acknowledge the destruction we’ve done and are doing to the environment. We must look at and acknowledge we’re scared about the economy. The more we acknowledge, the less it’ll have to go underground. The more we acknowledge, the less we will feel the need to take our frustration and fear out on someone else, or on another country through war.

The word I use for this is ‘trust’. What does trust mean in a world that’s falling apart? I think of this often when I imagine people living in war zones around the world. How do they find trust when they’re being bombed daily? What is trust in that case? You can’t say trust God when bombs are falling. You can’t say trust your neighbor, or trust that the universe has the best intentions for you. How could you possibly believe that as your friends and family are murdered?

I believe trust means to trust your instincts. Trust your gut. Trust your feelings. I wanted to say to my friend, don’t push down the annoyances of life. Trust your gut when it tells you you’re annoyed. Don’t push it down. That’s why you’re clinically depressed. If the dark was acknowledged, it wouldn’t need to go underground and bite you in the subconscious ass.

Another example of trusting your gut, and how important it is right now, is how to deal with people who are terrified and reacting out of that fear. I actually believe the world’s biggest challenge is going to be mass psychosis, not the actual physical and financial difficulties. Many people are losing their minds. It makes sense. It’s insane what we’re doing to our planet. It’s crazy-making.

So, if you can hone your trust in your gut, when someone attacks you verbally, lashes out at you, you can use your instinct to understand that they’re scared, they’re fragile, and you can react with compassion at best, or even not react at all so as not to escalate this fear.

If we’ve had abuse in our childhoods, we may have had our trust in our gut instincts damaged. So the work is to heal that damage.

As things progress, we’re all going to need our instincts. And we’re going to have to know how to trust them.

And the meek shall inheret…

Tree of light, www.carolineallen.com

When I quit smoking, well, when I quit smoking the LAST time, I had a dream where sewage was being thrown into a river.

A voice said: Would you pollute a river like this?

No absolutely not!

You are dumping sewage into the river of your body. It’s the same thing.

I quit that very moment and have found cigarettes repulsive ever since (this is after many years of smoking a pack of day, mostly in Tokyo and London where smoking was thought of as ‘cool’.)

When as a world we devastate the environment, we’re pouring sewage into our own bodies. It’s humbling to understand the earth this way. If my body is that clear-cut forest, then I am abusing myself, I am severing my own legs, and I must stop.

Friends and I have been spending a lot of time discussing how WELL we’re doing in the financial crisis. Every artist/healer person I know is doing better than ever, whether we have more work than we can handle, or we just feel very spiritual and our healing has sped up.

Why?

Because we KNEW this was going to happen, on a gut/spirit level. We’ve been addressing our spiritual side for years and spirit has been demanding we leave the real world, and go into healing or art. And from that place, we have known that things couldn’t continue the way they’ve been going.

Rampant greed, hatred toward the earth, overconsumption, rich countries getting richer and poor countries abusing their environments to keep in the race. Come on. It’s not rocket science.

And for my healer/artist friends, we’ve already been humbled. We followed spirit when the call came against ALL odds. We gave up careers, status, money, because a voice called to us and we listened.

We strive to connect with the earth, not fight it. We want the wisdom of the earth to direct our financial decisions. I want to do good healing work in the world, not amass more cash and cars and properties. It’s funny how I resisted the spiritual path and now it’s the thing that saves me. Wow.

Now the earth is saying to all those who’ve taken too much from her, I have no more to give you takers. I will disrupt the greed, and further I will have an environmental breakdown. You can’t continue to just take from me.

You’re taking from your own body. You’re abusing yourself.

As a child in the Catholic School system, I always stumbled over the phrase: The meek shall inheret the earth. What? Should we be strong? Doesn’t God want us to be strong?

But I understand now. It’s a humbleness and meekness to love the earth as yourself. It is the antithesis of the violence of those who take and take and take without giving, without caring that others are starving in the world, without one thought to how much of the earth had to be destroyed for them to enjoy their modern conveniences.

There are those of us that get it. And now we’re validated. I’m not saying we’re happy to see the suffering. I’m saying that we understand what’s happening…the earth will redress the balance. It is. It will.

I traded my soul and you owe me…

Nude with pallette knife, www.carolineallen.com

What I love about reading tarot for other people is that it brings up archetypal issues that affect us all.

I was doing a reading yesterday for a client who for years has been actively seeking a more soulful career path, while working in a corporate job. He’s very honest about himself and his beliefs.

As I was reading for him, it was as if the universe wanted to give ME information for this blog, because what came out of his reading was really a message for all full-time workers who didn’t like their jobs and who have just recently been laid off.

Here’s the message:

What has it all been for? You were told if you work full time, if you pay your dues, if you invest and save for retirement, if you PUT OFF following your soul and compromise by taking a mindless corporate job, you will be rewarded.

Now, where’s your reward?

This is why I’ve always been passionate about following your soul — even if it means living a humble life. Not just the financial crisis, but a sudden illness could make you see that there’s so little time and so much soul work to do. Why waste the time? For those people going through this, expect to feel rage. Let the rage up. Let it run its course. Own the rage, own the anger at yourself for making such a compromise. Do not project it onto other people. The energy of your anger can perpetuate violence in our already intensely unstable world.

So, for those who’ve been laid off, how can you do soul work now that you have the free time, but are overwhelmed by worries about money? I’ve been there. Boy, have I been there. The utter desperation you feel about paying bills, and how you can’t imagine taking time off to do something as vague and mushy as soul work.

But soul work is money! Really. On so many levels, soul work puts credit in your account, helps the people you love, is one of the smartest, surest investments you can make. The environment and the economy are shifting, dramatically. Nothing will stop this. Handling ourselves with grace and soul is the only answer left.

As an artist and writer, I work on my paintings and my novels and do not make much money from that work. (Although I do make a living as a writing coach…but I still do my art even though it’s many hours a week without direct pay.)

As I wrote my semi-autobiographical novel, I realized that my teen years were devastatingly brutal. Not only did no one nurture me, but people actively tried to kill my soul. This has been my personal soul work for a while now, understanding the depths of this lack of nurturing and working to heal it.

Then suddenly in the past two weeks, I was offered a job doing art with teens! The healing that’s happening for me is profound, and I didn’t have to pay a therapist. I was able to get a job as an artist directly related to my soul work during one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression. I got the job BECAUSE I was doing soul work.

Where is your soul right now and what volunteer work could you do related to the soul’s healing? Discipline the time you need to do job searches and budgets, then allow yourself a few hours a week of soul work in the world. You may be surprised by the serendipity that happens. You’re offered a job, or you meet people that lead you down a career path you would have never imagined, or you’re offered a plethora of supplies that you can’t afford to buy, or the energy of doing this work helps you to feel better about yourself and you get a job elsewhere…

One big truth is this — do not sit around feeling sorry for yourself because of the financial crisis. Get out there and do something. It’s imperative you do not isolate and shut down…that’s the worst thing to do!

I watered that plant a year ago

Will no one listen? Channeling fear in my art, www.carolineallen.com

There is so much fear and rage now. Fear whips with lightning speed like cars on a global racecourse, zipping around and around on a mad, endless track spanning the entire planet.

You can’t even figure out who to bet on. Cars crash and burn. Some change drivers mid-race. There’s no finish line anyway; it’s all mad crazy senseless spinning endless FEAR.

How to detach from this fear? That’s a very good and very big question. Do you stop listening to all news? Is it healthy to not know ANYTHING that’s going on? I’m not sure. I don’t know. I sat at Logan International waiting for a flight recently and the way the relentless fear mongering on CNN broke the crowd down was amazing. Toxic reporting. I’d wished I’d brought my IPOD.

I do know that one way to strengthen ourselves against fear and rage is to strengthen our ties to spirit. In an earlier blog I mentioned that our self esteem needs to be tied to spirit, not to houses, or cars or jobs. That’s what I’m talking about here…tying ourself to spirit to ward off world rage and fear — it’s all about connecting to spirit. Pull your attention AWAY from the fear, the Mercedes Benz, the color TV.

How?

I gave a tarot reading to a client recently that told her to do more spiritual work on a daily basis. She said: “Oh, I’ve already gone through that phase. I used to read spiritual books and do spiritual work all the time. I’ve already done that.”

I said: “That’s like saying, ‘I watered that plant a year ago. I don’t need to water it again.’”

The plant has shriveled from neglect. It’s now nothing more than a bulb that has sucked into itself, pulled all that earlier growth back into itself so it can survive as it starves to death.

To strengthen ties to spirit and ward off the rampant high throttle fear taking over the globe, we must do spiritual work every day.

We’re lucky because we live in an era where there’s a smorgasbord of spiritual healers out there. Reiki. Shamanism. Energy healing. Tarot.

Read a spiritual book, Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore, comes to mind. Or The New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle. Meditate. Read poetry. Take a walk in the woods. Write poetry. Write in a journal. Do art. Stare at the sea.

I’m talking about going beyond traditional talk therapy…which I believe is excellent but tends to just focus on individual needs. Spiritual work tends to take in all of society so that we don’t become too myopic. Spiritual work brings in nature and animals, too.

Water the plant.