The ebb & flow of life, especially when you’re actively participating in your spiritual journey, is often indicated by growth spurts and reality emersion. Growth spurts are time periods where your focus belongs to the spiritual message behind your experience. Reality emersion is exactly what it sounds like; even if you wanted to focus on your spiritual being, you are drawn to experiences that exist mostly in reality. Of course, there will be a fair amount of both experiences during any given moment, however one of these may be more emphasized. For example, the pandemic presented me with two new challenges: unemployment and lack of personal transportation. Though the build-up to these losses was a spiritual experience, the time period that followed was fabricated for me to experience reality-based lessons. Now, one year later, I have a job that I love and my old car is back in my life. Time to transcend.

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Personally…

I practice the self-love necessary to focus on each lesson without allowing anxiety to draw me to another one. For example, when the pandemic presented my negative relationship with alcohol to me, I did not spend that time questioning my relationship with anything else, like coffee or smoking. I simply took the advice, focused on the lesson at hand, and I was able to reshape my relationship to alcohol. If I gave into the anxiety that I had many addictions to work on and attempted to work on them all at once, I may not have been able to make these changes.

With that being said, my spiritual focus right now is practicing not taking anything too personally.

When I say this, I’m not just talking about the communication between two people. It’s more of the communication between me and myself. When I’m at work and a customer returns a drink of mine to be re-made, how I respond is never represented externally, only internally. The goal of not taking it personally isn’t to preserve the connection between me and that person, but rather avoid an unstable environment for my self-worth to grow. Sure, we can say that we’re just “considering a possible option,” like if I had assumed that my drink was disgusting and the customer hated it. More often than not, our “option” is the least likely and yet the one we spend the most time thinking about. In this way, it becomes a reality to us. Or at least it becomes the first thought in our mind, each time a drink is returned.

To not take it personally is to quite literally take the person out of it. In any situation, across the world, where a customer returns a drink to be remade, regardless of the specific customer or employee, it is simply because it’s not the way they wanted it to be. It is not the way they wanted it to be. In no part of that neutral truth am I mentioned. While we mostly see a self-centered world as one where someone believes they constantly deserve the best, where is the spotlight on the self-centered world where someone believes they constantly deserve the worst? How could the entire world or universe conspire against you? Could you really be so important that even strangers and inanimate objects taunt you about your incompetency? Maybe it is a sadder truth to think that nothing is ever really that personal, except for the way we feel about ourselves.

It’s a habit though, just like everything else. My favorite way to work on a habit is by using a tool I called personal intermissions. When something happens, I do not immediately respond or say anything. I only started doing this because it has helped me stop saying filler words like “um,” as well as helped me stop asking people to repeat themselves by creating time to process their words. However, in that time I found something else. In the silence between an event and my response to the event, I found my feelings. They are there, floating in the in between, unfiltered and unapologetic, until the moment I respond. You’re going to feel something new about the way you expressed your most recent feeling, whether you’re proud or embarrassed, and the old feeling can get lost in there. So when you take the time to feel it before anything else can touch it, you find yourself.

I take most things personally because it’s the process required to experience external validation. A compliment is a personal kudos to a way of being. When a customer tells me that my drink was the best drink they’ve ever had, the “option” I spend the most time thinking about is that I am a perfect barista. The other, more likely option is that I made it exactly as the recipe card said. Compliments are made to be taken personally, but the more often someone loves a drink the more personal I take it when they don’t. They cannot live without the other, because if the reaction to the drink determines something about me as a person, then it will do so negatively and positively. I am not a Starbucks latte, so I will find the time in each reaction to a drink I’ve made to handle it as a unique moment for everyone.

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Hey, if you’re going to be obsessed with yourself (and I recommend you do), listen to this song:

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THIS IS YOUR REMINDER TO SPEND SOME TIME ALONE TODAY

you need it for your health

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On Being Alone

Coming from an Aquarius, I am truly perplexed when people tell me they’re always with another person. If I had to always be around another person for my entire life… maybe my mom was right about me being an alien. Either way, I find that being alone is one of the only places to achieve the kind of meditation that really answers questions. Another possible option is that I haven’t mastered the art of energic shields and my spiritual wifi is always pinging off everyone elses’ which gives me bad reception. I will continue to consider all possibilities.

And still, I advocate for being alone. Even if you just sit in your car before your shift, give yourself a good amount of time in there. Take a longer shower today if that’s how you can be alone. Draw a picture of your alter-ego and ask them questions. There is this romantic idea I came upon as a teenager, this concept that we have universes inside of us. In retrospect, it is a really magical thought. But if there really were a universe inside of us, what would it see and hear and feel and know? And if this universe was always around other universes, in which ways would it grow and change and become something that’s never been before?

If you know what I mean.

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Do I Wanna Know, Tarot?

We’re going to practice something together right now. I learn best by teaching, or at the very least I enjoy studying with others, so I often merge my personal needs with my desire to teach. What I mean is that it’s been a while since I pulled myself a personal tarot reading and I thought I could walk you through the process.

I’m using my Mystic Mondays deck to pull three cards, followed by a Super Attractor oracle card. I always love pulling out my Mystic Mondays deck in the summer, it’s nostalgic because I basically learned how to read tarot on a picnic blanket in various forests with my friends. This deck was always there. The Super Attractor deck is still new to me, but I enjoy it’s manifestation properties.

QOTD: Hi, hi spirit guides. I’m here. I’m asking about this summer. What is the energy going to be like for me personally? What things will I have to face?

The first thing I pay attention to is the imagery. I do this before reading the deck’s summary of each card because I can reflect my honest intuition onto the pull. For example, I see the nine of wands and I immediately feel like I am that person. I have many things in front of me and yet I am prepared for them. The balancing concepts shared in both the four of cups and temperance give me this idea that I may be giving off only one side of my life. This means there is a shadow side that will continue to exist unless I find the balance, most likely in my need for meditating alone. I probably do not reconnect with my true self enough, causing an overarching exhaustion in my physical self.

Now the deck says this:

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Wow. I mean I said what I said right? These three cards cover almost everything I thought to talk about in this blog post. Spiritual validation on this Monday afternoon 🙂

Spiritual Attractor Oracle: “I heal the habit of fear and I embrace the habit of love.”

It’s funny because as things start to normalize again, I remember how often during the pandemic I felt as though I hadn’t gotten anything important done. I couldn’t think of one thing, except maybe move out of my parents’ house. The reason its so funny is because I remember, maybe a week into the original lockdown, I remember thinking I had the time to do shadow work so why not? That was over a year ago, I unknowingly consented to be placed in the spotlight of the universes’ mirror, where no dark side can touch my skin.

For me, it seemed like shadow work was mostly something I just agreed to. Sure, I let my mom do a past life regression on me; I practiced deep meditations that reopened old memories; I moved back to my hometown. These were not the things that enabled the shadow work to begin though, it was my pure and genuine consent to having it happen. I had handed over my control to the universe and every day since I have been building something real.

So when I read my oracle card all I can think is that I’ve come so far. I can see that my trauma won’t have control over my physical or emotional responses to others one day, and the kind of love I will let myself feel during that time is unknown and beautiful.

And that’s how I read my own tarot cards.

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Epilogue

Did you notice how I didn’t mention astrology once?

i read a really cool blog post today 😀

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