Tarot Blog Hop ~Throw Momma From My Brain…

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It’s Tarot Blog Hop time…

Welcome hoppers… I can’t believe it’s February already… Soon be Christmas! 😀

I very often just blurt things out without thinking and then think – Oh…. Lordy me!Why??? Why did you say that? In fact… yeah… I do it a lot…

So… I’ll give you a fairly recent example as it seems to lend itself easily to the topic of tarot, healing and creativity…

I was out reading at an event and I had a blast from the past when a woman I used to work with sat down for a reading. I read for her and when I’d done, she said to me – I need to ask you a question… I keep seeing you on facebook and all the stuff you get up to… I worked with for over a decade, I never knew you did all these things… where do all those pictures come from?

And I’m not entirely sure exactly what I said to her… but I know I laughed and I started with … Well… it’s pretty amazing what happens when you rid your life of people who tell you that you can’t do this, that and the other… Then I rambled off and I know I threw the ‘Mother’ word in there and I ended on… yeah… you know… blood may be thicker than water… but which would you rather swim in?

And then I halted as I noticed she was wide eyed, with eyebrows aloft and jaw hanging…

I said to her…oooh… ooops! My bad! You’re not supposed to trash the ‘sacred mother-daughter bond’ are you?

Now it was her turn to laugh… She said to me – I wish more people would be honest about that, I’ve just got to the point where I’ve realised that I’ve spent years feeling guilty, useless and a failure by trying to live up to the ideas of a woman who is impossible to please and now I’ve decided that I just don’t care what she thinks anymore, I’m being to feel happy with my life… Do you know what I mean?

Yes! Yes I did…

So… It takes you a while to work out that you have a strange mother… because well… that’s all you know… and besides… who isn’t strange in one way or another? But every so often you get a clue that your mother may be stranger than most…

And interestingly… one of the first events that caused me to pause and ponder, also first planted the seeds for my  interest in holistic therapies. I was 15 and had felt unwell for I don’t know… three, maybe four weeks and I’d been complaining to mother that I didn’t feel good and she brushed it off with ‘Shut up! You’re going to school!’ And I went to school and felt deathly and I really knew that I was ill when I couldn’t stay awake in Art class and my head lolled to the desk… and even the boy on the next desk, who I considered to be one of God’s finest creations, with his easy smile, almond shaped brown eyes and cheekbones that you could slice a cucumber on failed to hold my interest…

The next day was worse. It started by being woken up by screeching and screaming – GET OUT OF BED!!! YOU’RE LATE FOR SCHOOL!!!

And whereas for days, I’d been saying ‘I don’t want to go’ , that day I said… I can’t…

Then things became quite surreal, somehow I was in the car and waves of nausea at every movement and then arriving in the car park at the medical centre just as one of the G.P.s was arriving. She ran towards me… Come with me now, I’m taking straight into my surgery. Once there, she said… OK I know from just looking at you, that you have Glandular Fever, but I need to take blood tests to confirm. I can remember being prodded and poked and eventually her finding a vein in the back of my right hand and she was firing question after question at my mother… And then it was just me and her… She was talking and talking to me and I really didn’t follow much of what she saying. Firstly because I was slipping into what turned out to be 6 weeks of nothingness… a dark, black, empty void only interrupted by vomiting or the need to pee… But secondly, what was spinning through my mind was – How the hell did she manage to get my mother out of that room? That woman who for my whole life had hissed – Keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking… How did she get her out of the room?

But… the thing I do recall, is that G.P. telling me over and over… Listen to me! Listen… This is REALLY important…you need to learn to handle your stress… manage your stress or your health will always be severely impaired…

So… let’s skip on a few years… Here’s when I got a jolt and really started to think – What kind of mother do I have?

Around a few years ago, The Mother turned up at my house and threw down a bunch of old photos onto my kitchen table and in that pile, was this one above… She said ‘I’ve been getting rid of rubbish… I thought you might want them.’

I looked at them and I said… Why? Why do I want your rubbish? Who the hell is that anyway?

She said… It’s you… How can you not know that?

I didn’t answer her… I saw my sister a few weeks later and I told her what The Mother had said and showed her the picture… Do you know who that is?

She said… Of course I do! It’s you!

I said… you see that skinny waif… that’s the girl that spent two years going to ballet class barefoot because her mother refused to buy her shoes because she was too obese to ever be a dancer…

So… also around that time, I was undergoing Reiki training and if you take a look at those Osho Zen cards above… These were the sort of words that were being thrown at me… creativity… healing… letting go… going with the flow… guidance…

And I will just note here I use and love Osho Zen and also I not only still practice Reiki but also teach it… and my understandings and experiences of how I use these are pretty far removed from when I was ‘learning’ and what people told me I should be thinking…

But… at that time, I was surrounded with these people who were constantly spouting that I needed to heal this, that and the other and OH! what do you mean, you don’t worship your mother? And a whole barrage of I assume well meaning claptrap but claptrap nonetheless that left me thinking – Karen, what sort of freak are you? You’re a mess! You’re a bad person! You have no business to be in this business… blah, blah, blah de blah… And slowly it dawned on me that I needed to move away from that environment…

Then I’m not exactly sure how it crossed my path but I found myself somehow or another writing a piece for Tarot Turn…

Here’s the card I got dealt…

Judgement reversed… I remember feeling quite sick when I saw what I’d been given. At that point, I’d never really spent much time working one on one with individual cards and my head began to fill with stories that I’d read where people talked about what had turned up in their lives when they worked focusing on one card and the energies that it invited in…

I had a vague uneasiness and sense of dread and foreboding… Then the urge to work through my house top to bottom, one room to the next, tossing out old stuff, broken stuff, stuff I just didn’t like that much… I remember thinking… Oh… this is just avoiding sitting down and writing… when I run out of distractions… then I’ll write…

So… the whole house was sparkling and had a place for everything and everything in it’s place (Ha! It’s not been like that since 😀 ) And it was a Monday afternoon and I sat down on my sofa and the Autumn sun streamed in through my window and I thought… OK… all is done… so why do still feel as though something bad is going to happen?

The phone rang… I looked at, I didn’t want to answer it but I did in spite of myself… The Mother! Hysterical rantings…

Judgement Reversed had arrived… that phone call was a precursor to a series of events that meant a few weeks later would be the last time I saw my mother,  events that would find me standing in my bathroom ringing my sister with her asking me – Why haven’t you rang the police? Why are you still protecting her? Why can’t you understand what she’s done to you? Then she said the words that haunted me… Karen, where have you gone? When we were small, I would have followed you to the earth’s end… no matter how many beatings we got, as soon as you said Hey, I’ve got a good idea…. this’ll be fun… I forgot everything and followed you… Where did my big sister go? I miss her…

Yeah… Judgement reversed arrived… look at those coffins… corpses falling from the sky… then the angel’s wings upturned and looking like a fiery hell… That phone call on that day, blew the lid off of forty years of secrets and lies… so many things that had been hidden and buried… bit by bit they came to light, piece by piece over the next 15 months… They may still be more but I know more than I need to know now…

So… in the aftermath of XX Rx… I found myself landing in Mystereum… I have been swimming there for just over 2 years now…

And very many things have happened but here’s a whiff of what unfurled when I started sitting to talk with my birth cards…

So… that question of my sister’s that haunted me… It came back again and again… And funnily, it happened whilst I was hoovering… I have many deep and meaningful conversations with myself when the noise of the vacuum cleaner is droning… The question returned in my head and I thought… yeah… where have you gone? That child is dead… and I carried on with the cleaning as tears rolled down my cheeks and I thought… yes… she’s dead… she is most definitely deceased… she is an ex Karen… and I decided that maybe I should just mourn her and let the tears flow… But then I heard this tiny voice… very faint and distant… and I paused and switched off the machine… What did you say? I said… I heard a loud shout  of –  I’m still here you daft cunt! I started to laugh… oh! My inner child has a potty mouth!! hahahahaha she bellowed back… Of course I do! You daft bastard! I am you! 😀 I said… How am I  doing? She said…You’re doing pretty good! 😀

I’ve had much fun in Mystereum… It lifted the lid on all the things I’d allowed to get squished down… It taught me that life was a much fun as you wanted to make it… And I’m sure Mr Hoggard won’t mind terribly if I steal a quote from his book… I turn to the Imagination Primer and sit with Judgment and I find one of my favourite quotes…

‘You are no more at the mercy of your past than you are of old photo albums. Take more good pictures in your imagination!’

And that’s pretty much what I have been doing… over the last 2 years I’ve taken to writing and drawing and few more things besides… I even finally got my ballet shoes… I’m a god awful dancer! But… whereas before when I heard the word ballet, sadness crept into my heart… now I smile because I had some really fun classes and made some pretty cool new friends…

And just to throw a splash of divination in there… here’s my oracle deck that I use… I made this just under a year ago… but I think I’ll save that tale for another time…

So… talking Tarot and creativity… well let me share a snippet of a reading that one of my new found ballet buddies did for me…

It was a pretty lengthy reading, but during the course of it, she asked me – How do you feel about your creative process?

I said… well… If you’re talking about Art… then YAY!!! That’s magical mayhem and riots of colour and wild abandon (ahem! see BraRacle above… they’re pretty much selfies… 😀 )

But writing…. Ooooooooooooh…. vile!!! It turns me into a complete shite… even the cat won’t sit in the same room as me…

She said – Really? How’s that?

So… I pointed out these two cards… Ace of Swords above The Devil…

Oh… Look… see that goat down there… Imagine it walking round and around and around in circles, turning that post… round and around… deep in the bowels of hell and the darkest of dark places…round and around for the whole of eternity… Follow that pole up… Look… Now you’re in a twee little tea shop stood at the counter and there’s a rotating cake stand… Look… Look at the pretty cake on the top! Pretty with sprinkles! You want it! It’s gonna taste so sweet… You don’t care how it turns… you have no idea that that goat exists…

Ha! I said that to a musician recently… He said to me… Oh… your hell is lovely… you haven’t the foggiest! In MY hell… the goat is dead… and rotting… and putrefied… and maggots feast and… Oh… you have no idea you silly fluffy bunny! 😀 Your hell is a holiday…

So… I will leave you with a spread I made a couple of months ago…

I find this is best done on the floor… Order your deck then swirl it into chaos… then move your cards into five waves and pull a card from each wave, as and where you like then order them 1 to 5 as you feel they want to sit…

For those of you inclined to talk with Goddesses… this is Tiamat… I start this reading like this…

Tiamat, help me to delve into my deepest feelings and discover the secrets that I keep secret from myself.

1. How can I become more aware of the strength, depth, height and potential of my ideas?
2. How can I experiment and explore my creativity with wisdom and humour?
3. How can I use my imagination to bring ideas from deep dark places into a place of light?
4. Where can I find vibrant partnerships to share my ideas and creations?
5. Where are my blind spots? What can’t I see when my thoughts are churning?

Now take all of your thoughts and answers and turn them to one final question:

How do I best ride the waves of my creativity?

To carry on hopping…

Pick a link…

Ania M…

Master List…

Jordan Hoggard…

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