The Highway Shaman Wisdom Reading
for June 10, 2020
Today The LOVER card showed up with The TEACHER also popping out of the deck. Both in reverse. The theme of the week has been to let go of my “knowing,” to listen to more balanced points of view. This sequels from yesterday – my freedom from polarizing belief is worthy of CELEBRATION. After doing these Spirit readings every day for the past two months, more than ever, I recognize in the ACE OF WATER that, “Spirit always informs me and guides me, allowing me to illumine the darkest of places.” My essay below is titled, “Love is all there is.”
THE READING
The Elements Tarot:
THE LOVER: Vitality, health, exuberant energy. Depth of feeling and sensuality,
REVERSED: Spiritual union with a mate, tantra. Uniting of opposites. Coalescence of yin and yang.
THE TEACHER: Giving of yourself in a way that guides and instructs others. Transmitting information or energy that is helpful to or needed by others.
REVERSED: Willingness to surrender in heart and mind to anothers’ teachings. Gaining experiences and resources necessary to teach others through words or actions.
Osho Zen Tarot:
3 of Water – CELEBRATION – Only man has gone wrong somewhere, and he has gone wrong somewhere because he thinks himself to be very wise, very clever. Your cleverness is your disease. Don’t be too wise. Always remember to stop; don’t go to the extreme. A little foolishness and a little wisdom is good, and the right combination makes you a buddha.
“When you choose this card, it indicates that you are becoming more and more available and open to the many opportunities that are to celebrate life, and to spread this by contagion to others. Don’t bother about scheduling a party on your calendar. Ley your hair down, take your shoes off, and start splashing in the puddles right now. The party is happening all around you every moment!”
The Good Tarot:
ACE OF WATER – Unconditional love, overflowing abundance, the fertility of love.
“I am filled with love from Spirit and joyously let it flow out to others, where it fertilizes the seeds of co-creation. Love gives hope, shining brilliant light on all possibilities available to me. I’m optimistic about bring dreams into being. Spirit always informs me and guides me, allowing me to illumine the darkest of places.”
LOVE IS ALL THERE IS
Love, to me, is the greatest emotion: love is all there is.
All my life I’ve longed for the grand prize, the wedding cake of love. First to love myself more, and then to be loved by my family and friends. On top of all that I’ve wanted the cherry on top love: a women who loves me unconditionally, loves all my good aspects and all my not quite perfect personality traits, and vice versa: a mutual recognition of our true beauty.
Finding and sustaining the reality of a romantic love partner, has caused me lifelong angst. I found her for short periods, like the first few years of my long ago marriage, the short lasting love affairs, and the one hour sorties that weren’t really love at all.
After my broken heart 35 years ago, I became like so many men and women who have been hurt. I began to accept that maybe I’m not supposed to have a love partner, for so many reasons. It was easy to rationalize my aloneness, blaming it on: my age, not having enough money, my physical unattractiveness, my weight, my lack of desire to play the romance game, my sexual performance issues, my zen complacency, and so on.
Living on Kauai, Monk Island, for twenty years, between ages 45 and 65, I blamed it on the culture. Older men wanted younger women, who didn’t want them. Older women wanted men who weren’t screwed up and were still handsome, who could afford them. It appeared to me that the “new age woman” couldn’t recognize my inner strength and beauty; couldn’t fathom the true depth of my love. I felt like a victim of an unsupportive culture, like the chips were all stacked against me to ever find a woman to love.
I was taught and was confused by the adages: “You are not a victim,” “This is your creation,” and “The emotions you’re feeling are not yours.”
Wow. All this is angst, my loneliness, sadness, lack of love and so on, was my creation, and I’m not a victim of any of it, because all my feelings are not mine? I’ve been reacting to shit I made up my whole adult life, shit that wasn’t mine in the first place. Fuck.
How could the emotions which have been controlling my life, especially my love life, not be mine? And if they are not mine, why do I feel them so intensely?
The answer to all these questions kept peeking through my consciousness, like a little angel in the corner of my mind waving at me, saying, “You need to love YOURSELF, unconditionally, first and foremost, and then you’ll stop looking for love outside of yourself.”
Hmmm. I have had an issue with my weight, particularly my pot belly. It started to appear soon after my divorce 37 years ago. Then after an unsuccessful two year love affair, another broken heart, five years later, the tummy grew bigger and never went away.
Was my pot belly, more than anything, my shield, my protection? Were all the things which kept my belly fat: improper diet, lack of daily exercise, irregular sleep patterns, self-induced stress, drinking beer, staying relatively poor, unruly hair, thinking I couldn’t give a woman daily orgasms, and so on, an unconscious strategy to keep women away, to keep love away; a fool-hearty effort to insure against another broken heart?
From this transparent and honest point of view, I can see that I’m clearly not the victim of all the reasons I listed. That blame and victimhood are unrealistic, counterproductive habits, which can be changed.
I’m simply a very emotional man: a man wanting to love and be loved in return, to enjoy my life with a woman without all the, what I thought unnecessary, selfish demands and conflict. I could never understand, when I presented something with love, how it could be interpreted as the opposite of love, forcing me to explain my terrible motives, which weren’t terrible motives at all. In my mind, my only motive was to love and be loved in return.
I’m not alone with this story.