The Same Card - Would you believe it?

Each morning, I pick a tarot card to provide a reading on the events of the day. Today, I shuffled the deck and picked the same card I chose yesterday - the ten of swords. What are the odds?

I took this as a prompt to examine the issues this card brings up more deeply. So, if you have a tendency to waver between defensiveness and reclusiveness, both of which are protective mechanisms to ward off hurt, you have to acknowledge that these mechanisms are actually masking fear. At some point, we've been hurt by someone important to us and we developed ways to keep people at bay so we wouldn't have to risk that level of hurt again.

So below the fear we can usually find grief. A loss of some kind or a sense of abandonment has left us at sea, not being able to trust in a benevolent universe or God. We don our armour, prepared to attack or retreat, when what we really need to do is stand our ground without the armour and take the risk of being loved and accepted or being rejected.

How do we do that? We acknowledge that we have the strength to let in love or withstand rejection. We take the responsibility of experiencing our loss and sense of abandonment for what it is without adding on top of it any value judgment on our own lovableness. We accept that this feeling comes to all of us at some point in our lives, because someone who is also suffering in their own way inadvertently hurt us because they were not able to look beyond their own pain to address our needs.

A good exercise is to simply experience our defensiveness without analysis, and feel it drop down into fear (even abject terror). Stay patient with the feeling and watch it dissolve down into grief. Allow tears and a softening at the heart and experience your own vulnerability.

Stay with this long enough and you'll start to feel an opening of emotion at the heart. You may feel young and childlike. You may sense your connection with the divine that is a natural part of allowing yourself to be truly open emotionally. You may come full circle and realize that divine love is always there, cradling you, despite any rejection that may be handed out in this world. In arriving at divine love, you find the cure for your loss and, therefore, an ability to make your way in the world without wearing armour or carrying a sword.