Alysse Aallyn

Category: #Mysteries

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Symbiosis – interdependence:

    If This Card Chooses You – You’re running scared. Know you can’t make it on your own. We are social beings, we need other people, all those characters who people your dreams. We are DEPENDENT on them. This is such a tough thing to face that there are whole categories of people who go around insisting THEY “made it without any help.” They’re the only ones who believe it! They’ve actually assembled a vast team, and not only that, they are dependent on teams set up by others to provide safety, water, heat, light, transport. Visit a country where this isn’t a given and realize what a massive enterprise smoothly and quietly quietly takes place around us.

    Flourish, Don’t Exploit – Symbiosis benefits everyone. If it leaves you “worse off” it’s not symbiosis, it’s exploitation. In our dreams we fear depredation, loss, failure, humiliation. Our sleep world is the theatre where we rehearse our fears, presumably making them LESS LIKELY to come true! We fear dependence because that means our “supply” can be cut off. But we also provide supply to others. What, and who? Any way we can improve the supply lines?

    Warriors Understand Systems – We live in a flow. Achieving psychic flow state allows us to contribute to the constructive flow of life. Blockages are caused by greed, (wanting too much) by envy (desiring others’ take-down) and by narcissistic rage (if I can’t be happy, no one gets to be happy.) Warriors demonstrate positive flow with their lives, their relationships and their bodies.

    Warrior Danger – Interdependence is a delicate balance, requiring sensitivity, reflection, and the capacity to change. Above all we want to avoid “Doomsday thinking” in which “since” the obvious entropy of the universe ruins all relationships eventually, so, by this reasoning, they must be ruined NOW. This “fear” completely overlooks the spiritual growth which time can foster. Interdependence gives us insight and time and improved relationships – a recipe for emotional and intellectual thriving.

    Warriors Collaborate – Collaboration is inspired sharing. We are born with “essence” as our own unique mandate, and we acquire positive skills on our path through life. We contribute our skilled essence to the flow, and everyone has a different skilled essence to contribute. We inspire one another to our best achievements. We don’t want to live in a lonely universe.

    Warrior Challenge – To become independent (i.e. free) we must intellectually face the fact of our dependence on others and their dependence on us. Is there harm involved? Depredation? Abuse? Don’t make me repeat the 17 warning signs of an abusive relationship. You should be able to recognize them by now so that you can strategize a way out! If you DON’T recognize them there’s a very good chance your dreams DO. Pay attention to those. They are warning you. It’s possible to be abused by relationships with people we’ve never met – banks – corporations – landlords – employers – if this isn’t an equally mutual beneficial relationship we’re OUTTA HERE. (This is why authoritarians fear Cancel Culture. It reduces their depredation pool.) Yes, you CAN demand & secure relationships that are more beneficial.

    Warriors Don’t Self-Sabotage – Warriors don’t foul their own nests, pollute their springs or wage zero sum games. Warriors understand that win-win supports all life in general and their lives in particular.

    Warrior Opportunity – Nobody and nothing’s perfect and nobody wants that – ugh! Perfection is about stasis which is DEATH. WE are all about change, growth, evolution, and becoming. Wisdom! Sharing joy! A back and forth process involving OTHER PEOPLE. Let’s work on our confidence. Let’s work on our spiritual muscle. Let’s work on our mapping abilities so we have a good idea where we’re headed. Expect surprises and greet them when they show up: “Hello old friend.”

    Models & Mentors – “Symbiotic relationship in nature teaches us cooperation and shows that we are all connected” – Sanchita Pandey

    “You are in a dynamic relationship with the universe because your existence is win-win”

    – Teal Swan

    ‘Symbiosis is a much higher reflection of intelligent life” – Frederick Lenz

    “Love is a positive, symbiotic, reciprocal flow between two or more entities” – Inga Muscio

    #Haiku: Independent

    Lonely.
    Needing nobody
    Nobody
    Needing you –
    Welcome to Hell

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Flight – Ingenuity:

    If This Card Chooses You – Do you contemplate Escape? Everyone has flying dreams! In those moments, we experience absolute power and potential, which is exactly what these dreams are about. We often wake from them with a feeling of disappointed sadness: “You mean I’m earth-bound? I want to go back!’

    Warriors are Transformers – Your mind is a potent tool that not only solves “problems”, it transfigures them with transcendental thinking. The problem dissolves as the potential for revolution becomes clear. The Warrior Oracle Flight card asks us to “rise above” the problem and survey it from another angle. We soar over the difficulty! Our most transformative tool is the question: “What if?”

    Ingenuity sees connections where others see difficulties. Ingenuity
    relaxes by “tinkering.”     Let’s become expert at cultivating the alpha brain waves to achieve “flow” – a condition of subconscious harmony where ideas spring up and potentialities thrive. “Flow” is true freedom.

    Can you “waste” your life daydreaming? I’m one of those people who says “No”! But the mind is full of traps – cultural, educational and emotional – to keep us on a sabotaging treadmill of circular reasoning that gets us nowhere. Usually you can tell this is happening when you hear an intrusive “voice”: “You shouldn’t be doing this” “You’re an idiot” “That won’t work.” That’s not you talking, it’s the “Hidden Enemy” out to undermine your efforts to focus and connect. Without the confidence to dream, think and experiment you can’t become your best self.

    Warrior Opportunity – We need a supportive environment where voices saying, “You can’t do it” are drowned out by empowering affirmations. Some people use music to achieve this state, others use meditation. If the voices persist, you will have to focus on THAT as the problem and tackle them directly with a conscious daily practice of studying where they came from. Who are they? What happened to those people? Why did they attack you? Now that you are no longer a child you can usually see them for the tiny, disappointed, bitter little minds they were. These are not forces to emulate. Deliberately let them go. “I am sorry for you, but you have no power over me”.

    When You Can’t Go Backwards or Forwards the Only Solution is Up – Warriors are accustomed to thinking outside the box because they long ago realized they would never fit the box society had chosen for them.

    Warriors Invent – Warriors figure out brand new ways to do things based on innovative reasoning and creative solutions.

    Warriors Adapt – Warriors have been strategizing in their Training Journals and mapmaking on their Vision Boards for so long soon they can do it in their heads, on the fly. We know Plan A will probably not happen, possibly not even B, C, or D but a combination of all these or something new entirely that comes to you suddenly, in the heat of the moment.

    Warriors Amaze – Surprise is the entire art of War, says Sun Tzu. Learn to enjoy the unexpected. Don’t allow others to dictate to you behaviors and modalities. Warriors are free.

    Models & Mentors – “No problem of human making is too great to be overcome by human ingenuity, human energy and the untiring hope of the human spirit” – Bill Clinton

    “Mathematical reasoning is the exercise of inspiration and ingenuity” – Alan Turing

    “You cannot solve a problem with the same mind that created it” – Albert Einstein

    “Those who do not think outside the box are easily contained” – Nicolas Manetta

    #Haiku: Flight – Ingenuity

    I can’t
    Becomes “I will”:
    Eyes closed,
    Dreaming:
    Fantasy prompts
    Invention

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Marriage – Partnership:

    If This Card Chooses You – Time to consider your ideal partnership contract. What would it be like? Have you been dreaming lately about weddings? Love, proposals, marriage? About The One that got Away? About partnership enterprises in general – video gaming, tennis – where an Ideal Partner/Helper’s got your back? Warriors can’t make it through life without a partner. We’ve got friends who come and go, sometimes special ones, but they’ve got obligations of their own. What if we had a Perfect Friend who made our Best Life their priority? What if we were not only willing to do the same for them but to promise this in public?

    Everybody Deserves Somebody – We come into adulthood with strong memories of familial dependence. We are all attracted to caretaking behaviors and easily seduced by promises to read our minds and give us what we really want, even if we haven’t figured that out for ourselves. Then hormones click in and we discover Desire. Not only for bodies, but for Persons, Lives, Individualities. Other people are a spice, other people are a medicine, other people are a distraction – everything our lives appear to be lacking. What if we could combine all these needs together in one appetizing human package?

    Warrior Challenge – We rarely ask our friends to change their lives for us. They are VERY rarely willing to do so. But a partner is someone to actively plan a life with. You get to talk through all the Wants, the Possibilities, the Fears. Heady stuff! The challenge is to know Yourself well enough to make any sort of honest statements about who you are, who you CAN be and who you want to be.

    Sometimes Allies Need a Long-Term Contract – Lives are uprooted. Possessions are shared. Long term strategy results in map-merging to create a new – but more exciting – map. If you’re a giver, learn your limits. Because takers don’t have any.

    Someone Needs To Take Your Back – As the great mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg pointed out, each one of us is only half an angel. You need someone to cover the things you can’t cover. And if you were planning to start a warrior family, you need more than a partner, you need a spouse.

    Spouses Teach Honesty – The person who knows you best doesn’t put up with a false front. You literally force each other to get to the root of emotions and behaviors that will open up your psyches not just to each other, but to yourselves. The spouse who falls in love with you and forgives you finally allows you to fall in love with and forgive yourself.

    Staging, Experimental Life Lab and Boot Camp – we get to try out our ideas on each other. The Beloved Other is a Mirror and a Coach. The purpose of existence, the purpose of YOUR existence – suddenly becomes clear.

    Warrior Danger – A substantial number of partnerships fail. We all know this but we keep trying. Then there are the partnerships that evolve into Something Else, a Financial, Real Estate or Caregiving unit that is very necessary but also pretty far from what we had in mind originally. Our challenge remains the same. Is it possible to both know and be known? Can we find our Soulmate? Does such a creature exist? Is it possible to evolve with another soul to a higher plane of SuperSoul? Disappointment and betrayal are all too often the apparent outcomes.

    Warrior Opportunity – Soulmates DO exist! They DO evolve. We WILL change our life for another and they will change, blend, merge with us. Any interaction with another requires communication, boundaries, honesty, planning and “rules”. I put rules in quotes because a good partner keeps “transforming” the game and we keep transforming ourselves to meet it. The best way ever to honestly know yourself is to keep conscious, subconscious and unconscious in alignment. Purposeful dreaming is the best way to achieve that goal!

    Models & Mentors – “It’s not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes for unhappy marriages” – Friedrich Nietzsche

    “What counts in making a happy marriage is not compatibility but how you deal with incompatibility” – Leo Tolstoy

    “A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short” – Andre Maurois

    “The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person. You know they’re the right person if you want to be with them all the time” – Julia Child

    #Haiku: Marriage: Partnership

    Merged.
    Eyes when
    I can’t see –
    Two extra hands;
    Relay race –
    Inspiration.

  • Becoming a Warrior – The Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Age – Wisdom:

    If This Card Chooses You –You require an experienced hostage negotiator to help free you so it is time to make peace with your elders. Have you been dreaming of old people? Funerals? Aging in general? Dreaming of gurus atop mountains? Buddhas, caves, palaces of wisdom? Or are you fixating on a specific elder who had an influence – bad or good – on your young life?

    Warriors’ Effort Is Sacred – Failure is when you don’t try. Experience is the great teacher. Bad Judgment leads to Experience which leads to Wisdom which leads to Good Judgment.

    You Are Wiser Than You Know – Contrast elders you admire with those you avoid. Aren’t the latter complainers who stress to everyone they meet what a bad hand life has dealt them? They complain about their health, politics, the weather, other people – whatever crosses the windscreen of their increasingly tightening minds. In their world children never call, doctors don’t help, media is lying, weather’s getting worse, food is adulterated and we are all going to hell. This person is clamoring ever more loudly for ego strokes without apparently noticing the discomfort and distaste of those around them. Rather than trying a new strategy, they step up their whingeing.

    Read the room! Is what you want to scream at them but you realize they can no longer “learn.” This is the opposite of wisdom. This is senility. A brain is shutting down, a personality is beggared and no one wants to be around it.

    Think of an elder you admire. Nelson Mandela, Joe Biden, Desmond Tutu, The Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Oprah Winfrey, Pema Chodron, the Pope? These persons are Ego-Less. Someone who talks about others, not themselves. They authentically care for others. They discuss ideas rather than gossip and have a long memory of problems, solutions, trial and error. They keep themselves “young” in all the ways that matter. People flock to them.

    There’s an old Cherokee story about how each of us is born with a good wolf and a bad wolf inside of us. The one that gets stronger and takes control is the one you feed. Your challenge is to figure out how to practice your increasing wisdom every day. Accepting your dreams and encouraging their deepening understanding is the beginning of wisdom.

    The pursuit of gurus is inherently dangerous because there are a lot of con artists out there seeking hostages and slaves. Avoid dominance/submission games and people who use:

    1. Projection – People unwilling to see their own shortcomings use everything in their power to avoid being held accountable. Projection is a defense mechanism used to displace responsibility of one’s negative behaviors by attributing them to someone else. It acts as a digression avoiding ownership and accountability.
    2. Nonsensical conversations from hell – Word salad, circular conversations, ad hominem arguments, projection and gaslighting will disorient you and get you off track should you ever disagree with them or challenge them in any way.
    3. Blanket statements and generalizations –
    4. Misrepresenting your thoughts and feelings to the point of absurdity 
    5. Nitpicking and moving the goal posts 
    6. Changing the subject – never discussing the elephant in the room
    7. Covert and overt threats 
    8. Name-calling – stigmatizing, patronizing, labeling
    9. Destructive conditioning – They condition you to associate your strengths, talents, and happy memories with abuse, frustration and disrespect. They do this by sneaking in covert and overt put-downs about the qualities and traits you once idealized as well as
    10. Sabotaging your goals, ruining celebrations, vacations and holidays. They may even isolate you from your friends and family and make you financially dependent upon them. Like Pavlov’s dogs, you’re essentially “trained” over time to become afraid of doing the very things that once made your life fulfilling.
    11. Smear campaigns and stalking 
    12. Playing the Martyr or victim
    13. Demands Immediate Unthinking Fealty – When someone stresses the fact that they are a “nice guy” or girl, that you should “trust them” right away or emphasizes their credibility without proof, be wary.
    14. Baits and badgers you – Then feigns innocence
    15. Boundary testing – You are not allowed to have boundaries or even triggers
    16. Aggressive jabs disguised as jokes 
    17. Condescending sarcasm and superior tone 
    18. Belittling, degrading, shaming

    Our Scars Are The Definition of Beauty -You can see this is all about Control. Avoid those who seek to control or dominate you. Revered Elders such as those mentioned above would not do that.

    Warriors Know Their Allies – Warriors don’t fear becoming experienced. We seek it. People come and go, but the right ones stay. Time shows you the difference between the strength and honor of another’s heart. Warriors share their knowledge.

    Warriors Can Read the Signs – If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will. Train yourself to trust yourself. You can read and write maps, you can interpret Nature, you see Red Flags before they wave for others.

    Warriors Earn Peace – Random acts of kindness make everyone feel better. Warriors’ “can do” attitude spreads peace. Warriors welcome other peaceful spirits. We challenge the troubled to take their drama elsewhere.

    Models & Mentors – “You can’t control the wind but you can learn to adjust your sails.”

    – Jimmy Dean

    “It always seems impossible till it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela

    “Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens” – Jimi Hendrix

    “I am thankful to those who said No. Because of them, I did it myself.” – Albert Einstein

    “Experience is not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you.”

    – Aldous Huxley

    “It is never too late to be who you might have been” – George Eliot

    ‘Wisdom is the journey no one can take for us” – Marcel Proust

    #Haiku: Noble Heart

    Sit
    In peace
    Regift
    The rubble of your life:
    Wreckage
    Belongs to All.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    The Moon – Influence:

    If This Card Chooses You – Time to re-calibrate your influences. What are they? Sometimes you can’t know it, but you can feel it. Something is pressing on you, like gravity, the way the moon’s pressure rolls and presses on our tidal waters.

    Your Subconscious Knows – You are a secret to yourself but your subconscious has the answers. Yet she only reveals herself covertly. Time for some dream interpretation. Object dreams are fear dreams, people dreams are love dreams, motion dreams are future dreams. Don’t look for rigid accuracy – we seek connections, not edges, interpretations, not walls and blocks. The purpose of dreaming is to splinter blocks. If you are a writer, automatic writing reveals what you think about. Collect pictures that speak to you and collage them from insight. Try to name the figures.

    Warriors Are In Tune With the Universe – The opposite of fear, remember, is attraction, the opposite of love is hate and the opposite of yearning for the future is stasis. Each forward pulse contains its opposite. Warriors must learn many languages, of which the most important are non-verbal. The sky, the moon, the stars, the animals, history, the past, the plants, the dead, the future – all are reaching out to you. Be unafraid to listen and interpret.

    Warriors Are Aware of the Unseen – We are all under influences of forces we have never even heard of, yet the Warrior’s Quest is to own their Self and present it in its most beautiful incarnation, to God. To understand who we are at our core and to perfect that is our obligation.

    Warrior Danger – We seek to heighten, not damage, your self-will. Others in your life – relative, friends, advertisers, politicians – are trying to take control of you. Don’t let them. The way to stop that is to take control of your fears yourself, so that you will never be ruled by them. Remember, the opposite of fear is attraction. We always seek a way upward. The direction of the spiral must always be UP.
    Some influences are demonic and purely destructive. We stand up to them, we name them, we reject them. We learn their weaknesses and their targets. If necessary, we will battle them.

    Warrior Challenge – Recognize Health, in yourself and others. Promote growth in yourself and others. Take time for retreat, to build yourself and your powers and to recognize and name where you have come from and what you have battled. Treasure your Training Journal, share it, learn to profit from the trainings and maps of others. Build partnerships. Work on your Gratitude Practice – this is a glorious universe the God/Goddess deigns to share with us; from Love alone.

    Models & Mentors – “Moonlight drowns out all but the brightest stars” – J. R. R Tolkien

    “Like the Moon, come out from behind the clouds. Shine!”– Buddha

    “Everyone is a Moon, and has a dark side he never shows to anybody”- Mark Twain

    “The moon gives pure solitude and tranquility” – Haruki Murakami

    #Haiku: The Echo

    Sharp night; cold
    Moon; shush your chatter.
    Naked
    Pond consecrates
    Abandon.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Dreams – Imagination:

    If This Card Chooses You – Wake up! Do you look forward to dreaming? I like waking up in the early dawn because when I go back to sleep I can set an intention for dreaming – all the best dreams (and the most memorable ones) happen at the very end of sleep while you are coming up through the layers of sub- to semi-consciousness.

    Warriors Are In Tune With Their Inner Voice – Jung tells us that in your dreams, you are everyone. Every life you have ever lived and every life you will ever live comes to you through your dreams.

    Remember – As Warrior, You’re the Pilot – Do you long for caretaking? Are you eager to give over the reins of your life to someone else? If so, your dreams are likely to become scary, unmanageable and unsatisfying. It is time for you to take charge of your power – to admit that you are in control of your own brain.

    Warriors Are Seekers – We are self-defining. We are on a quest. Warriors experience to the fullest the nature of having a self. Become alert to the possibilities inherent in this particular incarnation and explore. Feel free to release your imagination.

    Dream Journal – Start a dream journal. Date it, and write, “I want to dream about…” Fill in the blank. Be as detailed and specific as you can manage. It is perfectly OK to allow your waking mind to construct desirable dreams – great works of art got their start in just this way! You may hear a voice… someone from the past who discouraged your “day-dreaming” and wanted you to focus on your work, on the present and on them. Explore this memory fearlessly. It is not rejecting or “hating on” that person to disagree with them – there are certainly times when the priority is to focus on other things – but right now you are exploring your own brain and testing out its powers. Clearly that’s an important and necessary project. Gently take control from this Remembered Forbidder and say, “This is my time now. I am in charge.”

    Warrior Danger – We all know the cautionary tale of Scary Guy Who Lives for Video Games and Doesn’t Have a Life. Do you secretly fear that the power of dreams and the pleasures of daydreaming will suck you away from Real World Competence? They won’t – so long as you are reality centered. Some people dream of different outcomes, things that are impossible – instead of finding workable avenues of growth and advancement. Positive dreaming deepens and enhances, doesn’t evade reality. It’s just that reality is so much wilder – and we are so much more powerful than we can credit!

    DREAM GROUP – Form a Dream Group with others to share the content of your dreams and listen to their fresh interpretations. You can even try Group Dreaming. Lie on the floor holding hands in semi-darkness playing drowsy music. Share whatever comes up. These are models for your future. Some of us believe this growth goes on forever – even after death.

    Models & Mentors – “I dream things that never were and I say, “Why Not?”

    – George Bernard Shaw

    “A dreamer finds his way by moonlight…sees dawn before the rest of the world.” – Oscar Wilde

    ‘You have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world” – Harriet Tubman

    “I’ve had dreams, and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.”

    – Jonas Salk

    #Haiku: Human Clay Sculpts Angel Wings

    We’re all
    Dirt:
    Humble beginnings launch
    Celestial imaginings

  • Becoming a Warrior – The Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Duality – Ambivalence:

    If This Card Chooses You – How many people are you? Twinning is Entwining. Sometimes we dream disturbingly about things we don’t want and people we aren’t. Feminists dream of rape, vegetarians dream of meat, pacifists dream of fighting. It’s confusing. What gives?

    Language Isn’t Subtle Enough to Explain You – Your personality manifests all feelings, all thoughts, all ideas, rippling through you in a vast subconscious river. Your unconscious connects with the “collective unconscious” of other peoples – dead, alive, even fictional. Why isn’t “hate-love” a word? You experience that regularly. How about “fear-attraction”? Common! What I’m suggesting is that we need to accept the fact that a “personality” is a dynamism, not a label.

    Warrior Challenge – Facing this might seem the toughest part, but it isn’t for artists, who routinely “play” along their edge, peeking over it and imagining life on the other side. Art is the best way to express this, an enormous relief since it’s non-committal. Of course, you’ll have to face the surprise of your relatives when your work becomes public: “Where did THAT come from?” But if truth be told, we’ve always been surprised to be related to those people.

    Warrior Danger – Society seeks to label, limit and stigmatize. Everyone is afraid of becoming our fear but Warriors need to explore our fear. A simple safe word can’t work when people – bankers, politicians, therapists, employers – are so fundamentally untrustworthy. That is why our identification of ourselves as Brave Warriors is so vital. The vastness of our potential cannot be controlled by language. We will never be butterflies pinned down in a museum box for the instruction/curiosity of others.

    Warrior Opportunity – Appreciate your Self. Don’t slam the door on your potentialities too soon. Sometimes the worst labeler, the most determined jailor, is Us. We are deeply afraid of wandering in the forest and losing the way to get home safe. But Warriors carry Home within them. As Nelson Mandela used to quote from his prison cell, if we are the captains of our souls we can be the masters of our fates. (Henley.) We can learn to tolerate a little ambiguity/uncertainty/ambivalence.

    Warriors Tolerate Uncertainty – Being a warrior is all about balance. The experience of balance-seeking is indescribable linguistically – it must be felt experientially. Warriors learn to live in a world beyond language where we can savor uncertainty and foretaste eternity.

    Warriors Relish Paradox – Two contraries not only exist together but empower each other – that creative tension is the lifeblood of emotion, imagination and personality.

    Warriors Coast on the Knife-Edge of Ambivalence – The desired is undesirable, the only possibility is impossible and the act of wanting forbids getting. Warriors become comfortable with the pleasures of this dance: “My future dissolves in beads of sweat, my present is my mirror, my past’s a shape-shifting whirligig.” (Aallyn)

    Leaders Must Surrender – Physics is magic and dreams embody history. This quantum world of “spooky entanglements” is one in which we warriors become expert. We accept not only that the cave we fear holds the treasure we desire, but that we are both cave and treasure, indeed, fear itself.

    Models & Mentors – “It seems we are capable of immense love and loyalty and as capable of deceit and atrocity. It is this shocking ambivalence that makes us unique.” – John Scott

    “Ambivalence is a wonderful tune to dance to. It has a rhythm all its own.” – Erica Jong

    “The Simpsons is about alienation and the ambivalence of living with a family who you love but drives you crazy” – Matt Groening

    “Poetry is the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.” – Billy Collins

    #Haiku: Yin/yang

    Inclined to spring forward
    Fade back; yin;
    Urge to return?
    Float forward;
    Yang.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

                  Seventeen -The Shadow – Dissonance:

    If This Card Chooses You – Consider the unseen. Are you dreaming of reversals? Sudden surprises or a creeping sense of unease? Upsets? Do you wake with a sense of having forgotten something important you almost understood?


    Something’s Not Quite Right – Ever have that sneaking sense you’ve wandered into a masquerade? We are trying to learn the rules, but the rules keep changing. Someone’s moving the goalposts. By the time you’ve arrived, the “promise” has “expired.”

    Impostor Syndrome – Are we the fake, or is it everyone around us who’s faking it? “Fake it till you make it” is definitely a rule. But is the game worth playing? Your Training Journal reflects the Warrior Reality. Meditation will reveal your wholeness to you.

    Activate Your Spidey Senses – First, have a self. This ought to be the easy part! Everyone has a self – right? If only! From our earliest memory not only was “love” conditional but ALL rewards were. We wanted to find out who we really were and what we were capable of but it never seemed the right time. Let’s start by taking our suspicions seriously – you’re not paranoid if they’re REALLY out to get you.

    Warriors Are Sensitive Instruments registering seismic shifts and deep tectonic disturbances below the threshold of consciousness. Something always IS “going on” and you have studied long enough to be alert to the many warning signals! This can be exhausting. We long for relaxation, peace and quiet, a clear blue sky without a single cloud.

    Warrior Challenge –The key to intelligent management of dissonance is to think of the world as an orchestra playing a symphony. The more able we become to distinguish the varied instruments and musical lines the more we will appreciate and enjoy the experience. Balance is key. We schedule regular periods of rest and renewal.

    Warrior Danger – Avoid a “bunker mentality.” The universe has many bunkers, but is bigger than any single one. We must cultivate a hierarchy of response. We get out of bed in the middle of the night for a fire alarm, not a phone notification. Don’t allow yourself to become dismissive and numb but seek out advice and encouragement from others who understand a healthy growth process. All of us live in groups, curate your group to promote intelligent awareness in an atmosphere of hope. Dissonance and dormancy are not doom.

    Resistance Is Never Futile – We each will be given a chance to spend our night on the watchtower, but you don’t need to spend every night there. Consider dissonance and discord invitations to accept maturity. We are putting away childish things. The sky is NOT falling, but the climate is under legitimate scientific threat. Strategize ways to band together with like-minded members of your community to take useful action. This is an opportunity to show self-love, as well as love for the group, the environment, the world and the future. The attitude, “I care about you so I’m going to take care of you” keeps us sensitive to the message of Universal Love that is always waiting breathlessly to embrace us.

    Suit Up For the Long Haul – There’s a reason you chose the ‘dissonance” card. You can sense something moving just out of your peripheral vision. Someone in your closest circle is lying to you. Do you know how to check for honesty? Test for reality? Check their pasts. Interview their friends AND their enemies. Are they pushing too hard? Trying to “sign you up?” How do they treat wait-staff? Do they speak disrespectfully of others? What’s their philosophy of life?

    When It’s Too Good to Be True – That often means the trap is just about to be sprung. Warriors think for themselves.

    Models & Mentors – Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to fads, trends and popular opinion” – Jack Kerouac

    “Better to fail in originality than succeed in imitation”
    – Herman Melville

    “If you don’t fit in, you’re probably doing the right thing” – Henry David Thoreau

    “Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth” – John F. Kennedy

    #Haiku: Depth Psychology

    Substrata
    Dissonance?
    Game on!
    Unearth yourself –
    Transect core
    Meanings

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Winter – Dormancy –

    If This Card Chooses You – You are torpid. What’s happening when nothing’s happening? Your dreams should remain lively. Do you dream of endless sleep? Deep snows? Hibernation? Do you identify with the drowsy bear and the sleepy sloth?

    Now’s the Time – This is the sacred moment before a burst of Warrior Creativity. You are gathering your forces. Compare it to a pregnancy. Things are happening, but so slowly and deeply you are not aware of them, with the result that you may feel confused and frustrated. Instead, revel in this burgeoning becoming in the midst of sleepy peace.

    Warriors Can Hibernate
    Sometimes a plan isn’t ready. Sometimes you’re not ready. Timing is everything.
    It’s a long wait sometimes, as anyone who’s ever been through eighteen years of schooling or a seemingly endless winter can tell you. But it comes faster if you turn your attention to other things.

    Waiting for Peak –– We cultivate our dreams without pushing or extracting them. We curate our sensations. Spin through pictures of animals – what jumps out? Who is speaking to you? What are they saying? What are you afraid of and why? Make notes and collect images. A collage creates a deeper, more resonant picture. Sometimes it’s all in the eyes.

    Warrior Danger – In sleep we are entirely vulnerable and we have cultural and historic reason to fear that state. Guard yourself with supportive beings, with sleep music, with healing rituals. The triple-locked doors, the blackout-curtained windows, the silenced devices protect us in our chosen nest. Don a bracelet of “worry beads”, summon your happiest memories and tell them by touch, eyes closed, one by one. Send every ounce of your remembered love and joy out into the universe with a command to come back to you a hundred times. A thousand times so that your love can spill over and be shared with all you touch, near and far.

    Warrior Opportunity – You are creating yourself. The fetus of this pregnancy is YOU. In every dreamy hibernation second you are rebuilding yourself, adding visions, promoting fresh understandings and positive interpretations. Life offers us the chances of joy and misery – use your conscious awareness to accept these tools and allow dream-time and prep-time to penetrate ever deeper into your subconscious, (sometimes called the “preconscious”) to the unconscious, and down down down, deepest of all, to the collective unconscious where we recall in our bones and teeth and cells everything that has ever happened to every living thing as if it happened to us. This is the source of all imagination and creativity, accessible to you in the dream state.

    Be Patient. A Watched Pot Never Boils. The mouse is a whole lot likelier to come out of the mouse-hole if the cat isn’t waiting on the other side. Free your mind to imagine what it feels like to be everyone, anyone, in your constructed scenarios.

    Over-thinking is bad for your brain – Ever heard the expression “Sleep on it!” The only time you shouldn’t sleep on it is in the heat of battle, and the clever warrior AVOIDS battles. ALWAYS sleep on it! Ask your dreams to send insight, bubbling up from the pre-conscious. Participate in artistic pursuits, allowing metaphor and symbol to work it’s magic in your subconscious. Do something completely different. Refresh yourself.

    Models & Mentors – “To lose patience is to lose the battle.” – Mahatma Gandhi

    “Grow in patience when you meet great wrongs and they will be powerless to vex your mind” – Leonardo da Vinci

    “Patience is not simply the ability to wait but how we behave when we are waiting” – Joyce Meyer

    “Patience and Time do more than strength and passion” – Jean de la Fontaine

    #Haiku: Ghosts

    Ghosts
    Enable, unmask
    All our
    Dormant selves
    We could not
    Would not
    Be.

  • Becoming a Warrior – the Warrior Oracle by Alysse Aallyn

    Recovery – Rebirth –

      If This Card Chooses You – Re-Imagine Yourself. Have you been dreaming of rebirth? Second chances? Starting over? Do you wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “Mulligan!”

      “The bad news is time flies – the good news is, you’re the pilot.“ Recovery is what happens we repel a demonic force that kept us in thrall – could be addiction, illusion, corruption, compulsive behavior; even a poisonous culture. Were we hostage to another human being who didn’t want the best for us? This requires deep thought about our best interests. As our brains clear we get ideas. Ernest Hemingway used to say we are “stronger at the broken places”; Nietzsche expressed it as “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. Healing provides peace as well as joy. We give thanks that we have begun the journey.

      Second Chances are about expecting to stumble. Watching toddlers try to “rise and walk” we consider it lucky that they don’t mind being laughed at. (In fact, they love it.) It takes them time to figure out this new challenge. Like beginning skiers, they cling to objects, sway exaggeratedly back and forth, slam into things, and plop down SPLAT; not just once or twice but over and over. The toddler hasn’t been born who suddenly vaults up suavely and starts swanning around in a sophisticated manner. Embrace the last step of Recovery: “Expect to go splat.” Of course we don’t WANT to – fingers crossed – it’s dangerous and bruising. We’d better arrange to have someone around – just in case. But you don’t fail unless you refuse to rise again. Don’t even bother counting the times you were “brave”. It’s only the “getting back up” that counts. As long as you’re doing that, you’re a true winner.

      Warrior Danger – Life never goes the way we planned. There’s the excitement of finding a plan, investigating goals, making them ours, and committing to the plan – and then there’s living the plan. Suddenly we don’t know how to get through the next ten minutes – worse, we make a “big mistakes” unconsciously. The rational self we’ve planned for fails to show up and instead we turn into some irrational monster who threatens murder when momentarily frustrated. This is like sport-learning. Allow each new behavior to penetrate every fiber of your whole body. Rehearse over and over. (10,000 times?) It’s ALL mistakes at first.

      Concepts of “perfection” and “purity” are completely misplaced here; this is more like forming calluses over tender new skin. It feels funny at first, sore. It might actually “hurt.” We’re on the early steps of a long journey to a wonderful place; and we won’t get there unless we forgive ourselves, pick ourselves up and keep going.

      Warrior Opportunity –
      Ever heard of a “dry drunk”? The phrase refers to the state of envying those who “indulge” and feeling that we are somehow lesser, damaged beings because we “can’t.” How does this regret pertain to the warrior’s pledge of mindful living? We are devoted to contrasting our planned empowerment with others’ benumbed abandon. Think about what this means. Who envies loss of consciousness? Wouldn’t it be better to remove the source of the pain, the shame we are escaping from? Is this nostalgic fantasy of mental sleep really some faint memory of union, with the lost, beloved Other? What would it mean to give up these blind yearnings, this cultivated pain and these unbearable memories to lead a fresh, released and intentional life? It means accepting and becoming a new self in all our exquisitely uniqueness, exploring everything that implies. Recovery is “self-forgiveness”; going forward with a clear-eyed, honest appraisal of ourselves, resources and desires. “I am free”

      Warriors Crest the Wave – Most people have too narrow a self-definition to dare to try new things, but daring and courage are essential features of being a Warrior. Just because something sounds uncomfortable doesn’t mean we won’t someday like it so much we make it part of ourselves. If you’re used to sleeping on the floor, going without breakfast and struggling with a new language, you’ve learned to be unafraid of those things.

      Warriors Are Cagey – We don’t expose ourselves to unnecessary danger. We are constantly developing our safety instincts to recognize insecure situations before they get out of control. A main reason for frugality is that situations can become “too comfortable” – your senses are being dulled! Sharpening senses is what Warriors are all about!

      Warrior Are Reborn Many Times – Creating our own maps means we go many wrong ways before we find the right one! It’s the process. Throughout our quest we transform ourselves many times to incorporate our new knowledge.

      Self-Definition Is Key – Should you be ashamed of taking a wrong turn? Or confident because you figured it out, and proud that you were able to change?

      You Chose the Recovery-Rebirth Card – Your body is completely new every seven years. You welcome every new day. You are eager to meet new people and find out what makes them tick. You like putting yourself in new situations and figuring out how to cope. Read “Survival” manuals and try out escape rooms with your friends. Explore the sport of orienteering.

      Models & Mentors – “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life”

      – J.K. Rowling

      “The airplane takes off against the wind, not with it” – Henry Ford

      “Believe you can and you’re halfway there” – Theodore Roosevelt

      “The best way to predict your future is to create it” – Abraham Lincoln

      #Haiku: Recovery = Rebirth

      Mulligan –
      Rare gift;
      A “do-over”
      ‘Cause you DO know
      What you know now