The coronavirus pandemic has called forth some unsettling archetypal forces in all of us. In normal times we ignore most of them as we go about our daily business. But our daily business has been interrupted by our species’ relentless destruction of biodiversity. This has created the conditions for a viral disease that impacts the health, economy, and well-being of countries throughout the world.
This plague has crushed our safe and familiar hamster wheel. We’re forced to slow down. Our feet are tied to the present moment. In this in-between space we can see the past and imagine the future. Recognizing the dysfunctional aspects of our old lives sets up new conflicts, tempts us to imagine new ways of thinking and living. What outworn habits and attitudes will you leave behind? With what will you replace them?
The Hanged Man Tarot Card addresses times when everything is upside down and life and death seem to hang in the balance. Times when something old is dying and something new wants to be born. What can you learn from the Hanged Man?
Use the following incisive questions to do a status check on the well-being of your mind, body, and spirit.
Mind: How are you feeling about the forced isolation, the threat of illness, the economic instability? Can you honestly acknowledge uncomfortable emotions or do you tell yourself you’re fine? Can you feel your fear? Anxiety? Anger? Sadness? Depression? Resentment? Frustration? Denial? What feelings are driving your decisions? Which ones prevent you from making healthier choices? Everyone experiences feelings like this and we each respond to them in our own way. What is your way? Has this time of uncertainty brought out the shadow of your inner child? Does it trust the grownups to take care of you? Or is it afraid to trust anything at all?
Perhaps this time has awakened the shadow of your inner adolescent. Do you blame your parents and other authorities who are supposed to protect you? Are you angry at law enforcement, the government, religion? What face do you show the world? Do you act bold and bullet proof? Rebellious and defiant? Strong and independent? Or are you fearful and dependent? Do you cover up your feelings with a mask of apathy? Nonchalance? Indifference? Do you have a laid back, devil-may-care attitude? Do you find diversions that engage your mind and sap your energies so you don’t have to feel anything at all?
What about your relationships? Who’s in charge of your behavior toward others: your shadow or your wiser Self? Are old grievances, resentments, wounds, and disappointments bubbling to the surface? Do you take out your frustration, fear of failure, or sense of helplessness on your loved ones, or are you kinder and more grateful for them? Can you listen to criticism and accept the truth without being angry and defensive or do you lash out in retaliation? Do listen to others? Can you communicate with patience, honesty, and self-restraint? Do you withdraw or draw closer? Are you supportive or critical?
Body: Remember that your mind and body are connected. How you treat one automatically affects the other. Do your self-criticism and self-doubt sap your energy? Do you attend to your health or neglect it? Are you experiencing new or intensified physical symptoms? Which parts of your body are asking for your attention? What effect do your thoughts and emotions have on your physical health?
Do you get enough exercise? Do you stress yourself out with worry and too much activity? Do you make time to rest and relax? Or do you rest too much? What about your eating habits? Are you eating more or less? Do you eat healthy food or junk food? Are your meals balanced? What about your hygiene? Is it better or worse than before the virus hit? If worse, how does that make you feel?
If you don’t like the way you feel about any aspect of your physical health, devise a plan that will make you feel better. For example, order supplements and healthy food to be delivered to your home. Spend more time in nature. Find ways to exercise at home.
Spirit: The Magician Tarot Card represents willpower, an aspect of your sacred inner Self. Magician says it’s time to tap into your full potential. Throw yourself into activities that bring out the best version of yourself. Harness the Magician’s power to create the world that best suits who you really are. Work to become the individual you are meant to be.
Can you find the humility to ask for help from forces more powerful than yourself? Can you use your willpower to surrender your ego’s desires to a higher will? Can you tolerate the tension of uncertainty about the future with trust and hope?
Can you remember your childhood passions and dreams? Can you find the willpower to fulfill them? Can you hear the song your heart still sings despite everything you’re going through? Can you stay present to gratitude and joy in the moment?
Notice the questions that make you uncomfortable and take steps to change them. Find creative solutions. Do things you’ve always wanted to do but never had time for. Refuse to lapse into Inertia, idleness, escapism, procrastination. The choices are yours and you are powerful enough to make them. If you attend to and recreate your inner world, the outer will follow. How will you turn this time of misfortune into an opportunity to grow into the person you really are?
Jean Raffa’s The Bridge to Wholeness and Dream Theatres of the Soul are at Amazon. E-book versions are also at Kobo, Barnes And Noble and Smashwords. Healing the Sacred Divide can be found at Amazon and Larson Publications, Inc. Watch for her new book, The Soul’s Twins, to be launched by Schiffer Publishing this October.
10 Responses
Very insightful and incisive questions Jean…thank you.
Thank you. It’s good to hear from you.
Like you, I’m always seeking ways to further consciousness! This turbulent time seems to evoke that need in many of us.
Be well, Jeanie
Thank you, Jean. Your questions prompted the perfect inquiry today, as I celebrate my birthday and set my intentions for a new year. ?
Happy birthday, Colleen! I wish you a joyful, love-filled day.
Birthdays are a perfect time to take stock of ourselves, aren’t they? To me, they are more in accordance with nature’s cycles than with man’s inventions; for example, on January 1, which for some signifies the beginning of a new year. We humans invented the calendar; our Sacred Mother invented birth! 🙂
Be well, Jeanie
Thanks Jeanie, these are penetrating questions we would all do well to reflect on. I’m being a bit creative, the odd bit of painting and writing, a little reading. Taking myself in hand a bit with regard to my appalling eating habits. Taking care of one’s own self is probably the hardest task but when one starts it all falls into place a bit. Like saying yes! to the universe and the universe responds.
Thanks, Susan,
Are you still gardening in your new location? I know that can be very creative and enormously satisfying.
I agree. Committing to healthier eating is extremely difficult for most of us, I think, although I know several young people in my children’s generation who seem to have far healthier eating habits than my generation did. I guess if it’s modeled to you at birth, it’s a lot easier to eat the way you always have. Far more difficult to change old, ingrained bad habits.
I finally acquired the self-discipline and will-power to change mine when I consulted a doctor of alternative medicine about some allergies I was developing. She put me on an all-organic paleo diet and wow was it hard at first, but oh, my, what a difference it has made over the last two years. I’m so glad I did it. It does feel like the universe has responded to my Yes! Which is a sort of surrender, I guess.
Much love,
Jeanie
Wow! Thank you for enough big questions to last a while. When I feel stuck, I can read your questions and go with my responses. I felt myself pulling back at this line: “Magician says it’s time to tap into your full potential.” Before reading your blog, I worked a dream with my dream therapist. I had the dream last night about my lovely woman doctor who is a well educated pediatrician from New York City who decided with her husband, also a doctor, to live in the country and take less pressured jobs. They had no idea what a good choice that would be. She also transferred to general practice. In the dream my doctor is pregnant and will have her child at the age of 78. (Hmmm…. I have a few years to wait until the new child appears. In life, my doctor is in her 50s.) The dream takes place in a fertility clinic with a focus on eggs, saving eggs, harvesting eggs, life-giving eggs, pregnancy. I realize when I resisted the line of tapping into my full potential that I’m not there yet. I’m in the egg stage. In outer life this is reflected by the 20 Monarch eggs in my caterpillar nursery and 4 eggs in the bluebird nesting box which should hatch any day. If I follow my heart instead of my ambition, I check on the eggs in my outer and inner life to identify and nurture the potentials that might come next. And I don’t yet know what they are. The dream reassures there is a future with fertile eggs.
About health questions, my young dog has a job other than providing company and love. She’s my at home exercise trainer and when I adopted her, I didn’t know I’d exercise only at home. I’m fortunate to have an organic vegetable farm share delivered every week plus my own salad garden, so I have organic vegetables and ripening local fruit. Do I do enough or read enough? I don’t know. I thought I’d be continuing with already developed writing projects with Jungian themes, but instead I raise Monarchs and search for their eggs on milkweed leaves. So much about now is letting go of my driven negative mother complex that says I’m never enough. For now, I’m allowing life’s beauty, my son’s presence a few miles away, a few close friends, small writing projects, and not knowing to lead the way. Thanks for giving me so much to ponder and digest.
Thank you, Elaine.
In fact, when I was writing those lines I thought about how those of us who have been driven to fulfill our potential for so long might not see Magician’s message the same way as people who have learned to be truer to their feminine sides would. But then I got distracted with other things I wanted to say and didn’t remember to add that clarification. So thanks, because now I’ve said it!
And thanks for your beautiful point that if we pay attention and stay on the lookout for our honest feelings and the symbols that show up in our lives and dreams, we know when the time is right to tap into more potential and when it’s time to rest. After my last book came out in 2013 I was exhausted and was certain it was, indeed, my last. For seven years I did as you are doing, followed my heart, while occasionally feeling guilty about not writing anything other than my blog posts. Then suddenly one day after a series of synchronicities, my daimon/muse reappeared and said, “Okay! This is it. Get going!” And so I did. The Soul’s Twins is the result. I think the key is to surrender to the Sacred Other within and without, in whatever way we think of it, and trust to take care of things in its own time while we simply do our job of being true to ourselves and staying alert for guidance.
I envy you your love for food and cooking and gardening and healthy eating. I’m totally organic now, but I’ve never gotten much pleasure out of cooking or gardening. I wish I did, but I just don’t! I cook because I have to, not because I want to. I used to think that made me a terrible wife and mother but now I think it’s just who I am and who I am is perfectly fine. 🙂
Thanks for letting me know this gave you food for thought!
Love, Jeanie
Thanks Jeanie for your lovely reply! You gave me ‘food’ for thought! I was interested to look up organic-paleo eating and I mostly do that. I do eat healthily actually, spinach from the garden, lettuce, parsley, basil etc and definitely no processed foods. And we were brought up eating very healthily ala Adele Davis ‘Let’s Eat right to keep Fit’ my mother’s bible. BUT I have a sweet tooth, not helped by a friend who brought me homemade shortbread, not just a dozen pieces but I reckon about 5 dozen at least. Soooo delicious! Even she was a bit shocked when I scoffed 2 pieces before supper last night (they’re staying here for a few days seeing to alterations to their Plett home – they’re from Natal a long way away).
Am just up from the garden, labouring over my aloe garden. Removing stones, raking, planting, positioning heavy stepping stones as a decorative item. Thankfully I’m strong, touch wood.
Love to you, stay safe from this virus. It’s peaking here in SA. We’re concerned about our guests bringing it in after their busy day of checking on their new house and shopping for fittings etc. thereby coming into contact with potential carriers. We’ve asked them to take extra care when they come into the house, wash thoroughly change their clothes before coming upstairs to where we are. A palaver but there it is ..
You always give me plenty to think about too.
Yes, sweets will do it! I’ve tried very hard to follow the paleo rule of sugar-free, gluten-free, and dairy-free, with the exception of an occasional glass of wine…which, of course, has sugar. Sometimes I also eat some organic dark chocolate that’s over 80 % cacao as a bedtime snack! And I don’t worry as much about raw, unprocessed sugar. I’m not as strict now as I was at first, but I’m still doing fairly well!
Your aloe garden sounds like a fun project! I did some garden art with heavy stones up at the cabin some years ago, but I’m over that now! 🙂
Sounds like you’re taking very positive steps to avoid contact with potential carriers. Well done!