If This Card Chooses You – You need to relax! Can Warriors afford to relax? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Well, Lesson #1 is that being a warrior is Counterintuitive. Other people rush away from the burning building – planning on being EVEN MORE SCARED the next time. Well, we are going to master our fear. We are going in.
Let’s Panic – I had a panic attack at age 5 (I got lost outside a movie theatre) and another at age 11 when I descended deep, deep, deep into a cave. (I think the guide was deliberately trying to scare us.) I didn’t know at the time what these episodes were – my parents and sisters saw them as embarrassing annoyances – but looking back it’s clear what was happening to me physically as a result of what was happening to me mentally.
Relaxation In the Face of Panic – Learning to tolerate psychic dissonance, to be interested in it and challenged by it is what we’re all about. It’s a sign that we’re in the presence of the Deep Stuff – the things that galvanize our deep subconscious and if we can just seize control of that, we’ll access our true power.
Learn Relaxation Techniques – There are so many and you should experiment with all of them! Learn what works for you and – key – what you enjoy. You will find yourselves using these techniques all the time. To get to sleep, to get through difficult experiences or just to access your subconscious when you have a question.
Breathe Deeply – The very first thing is mastering control of the breath. Pregnant women learn all kinds of helpful breathing techniques in Lamaze; panting, counting; deliberately slowing down and speeding up your breathing. In yoga you will learn Lion Breaths to make you feel powerful. They are very similar to the gasps and shouts in martial arts and will affect your opponents. Watch the Maori war dance on YouTube.
Get Out Your Training Journal – write down the techniques and your reactions. Appoint a time to practice these every day. Your breath connects you to the universe and all living things.
Models & Mentors: “The first thing to learn is the breath.” – Confucius
‘Breathe In. Let Go. And remind yourself that this very moment is the only one you know you have for sure, and give thanks for that.” – Oprah Winfrey
‘Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
“While we breathe, we hope” – Barack Obama
#Haiku: Every Breath You Take
Life isn’t numbered By breaths you take but Moments That take breath Away
What It Means When This Card Chooses You – You are one of the Elect. Most people feel that because the Goddess card represents power it’s the most valuable card in the Warrior Oracle deck. But we are all familiar with fires that get out of control, rage-fueled spirals, explosives that blow up in your face and escalating weaponry. Owing to the Goddess’ power, much can go wrong.
You Have The Power – The true meaning of this card is that you have the force within you to get things done and to bend unfriendly circumstances to your desire and will. Isn’t that what we all want – a little magic?
You Are Iconic – But the Goddess card is about more than magic, it is about the inherent magic that is especially, irreplaceably You. You have a power no one else has, incorporated in your being, your possibilities, your desires and your memories. This takes a lifetime to accept because we all nervously want to be Someone Else and experience existence through the armor of Having only an Outside instead of just the very vulnerable Inside in which we all feel imprisoned.
Dreams Instruct You – Your dreams bring all these passions together as psychic poetry, elucidating what you think you want, what you hope you want and what you are afraid you want. The ultimate magic is to seize conscious control of this potent power source.
Warrior Challenge – The challenge is to truly connect with others, reveal our world Inside, and avoid blasting their apparently impenetrable Outside with our terror, our longing and our fear.
Warrior Danger – We cannot take hostages and we must never become a hostage. Freedom is a fine line to walk. If we wish to reach out, we must treat others with respect and claim like respect for ourselves. Accept your “experiments”; do not fear them but allow them to take you where you need to go.
Warrior Opportunities – There will be stumbles and terrors aplenty, also successes that LOOK like stumbles and terrors, but which we only realize on reflection were real leaps forward. This is why we must carefully assess our daily efforts without being harsh with ourselves. Speak gently to yourself as you would to a most beloved child. You are your own Most Beloved Child. It is not selfish to commit to this belief, it is simply placing the oxygen mask over your own face FIRST so that you can administer this life-saving force to others. Find someone with whom you can share your journey, without fear or judgment. This connection will teach us everything we need to know about how to connect with others.
Fear & Trembling: Where would we get the courage to become warriors? Human history begins with an enormous fear of God or whoever is causing all that lightning, those earthquakes and striking everybody down. Killing small helpless, pretty things was meant to be flattering and propitiatory to this God (I don’t get it either.) then Jesus came with a message about how God was really loving, generous and wanted the best for us. We know how that turned out.
Becoming a Warrior: As children, we struggled to understand where we fit on the power spectrum. I tried killing a snake and experimented with bullying other children the way I was bullied. I didn’t care for it. The only relief was in thinking about, researching and understanding what was going on. My earliest researches, as for many children, were in astronomy and dinosaurs. The cold magnificence of the planets and the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs gave me a way to stand back from the immediate suffering of the schoolyard. I then moved on to the early Egyptians who tried to solve their problems through magic and art. The art was visually appealing and the magic was emotionally soothing.
Pick Your Battles: I saw that most schoolyard fights were a reaction to the immediate suffering of pain or confusion, and that they magnified, rather than solved, those problems. There was a manifest holiness about this discovery. It rescued me from the torture of everyday life and elevated me to a plane where every other contributing thinker had already become immortalized.
Study & Strategy: I read everything I could get my hands on in history and biography (research) and in fairy tales (magic). When I fell in love with the novels of C.S. Lewis and Rumer Godden, the world judged my taste good – when I discovered Agatha Christie, it did not – but it turned out everyone else was reading her too. Agatha is a short course on human nature (original sin) and a proponent of both the scientific and Socratic methods. She’s great training for a Warrior. I wrote it all down in my Training Journal.
Claiming Your Power: By the time you’re a teenager you can see you have some power – some mental, some physical. The question is developing it and finding appropriate gurus. Avoiding the dominance/submission game.
Keep Going – Recognize that you have been touched by the goddess and honor her by being grateful for the glorious gifts of life.
Models & Mentors: “I did not deceive you. I permitted you to deceive yourself.” Agatha Christie
“An Indian proverb says everyone is a house with four rooms – physical, mental, spiritual and emotional. Most of us live in one room or the other but if you don’t visit each room each day you are not a complete person.” – Rumer Godden
“You are never too old to dream a new dream or set a new goal” – C. S. Lewis
“You have to believe in yourself” – Sun Tzu
#Haiku: Wyvern
My power Beast bristles Fire; Eats critics Guards path Sleeps in my Mirror
What It Means If This Card Chooses You – You are gathering force for a great work. Do your dreams pulse with some energy gathering within you? You are readying yourself for some great task.
YOU ARE A POWER – You are struggling to find your force. You feel the power and strength of as yet undefined wishes and the longing to create your place in the world. No guide exists to this wilderness, you will have to map this forest yourself. Be brave.
YOUR CHALLENGE – There are plenty of traps ahead. Do not become discouraged. Accept that the flow of energy pulses with your every heart beat, with your sleep/rest cycle, with the obligations you willingly seek to smooth your path.
YOUR DANGERS – Some of these obligations become too heavy, others seek to deter you from your set course. Still others offer false maps that seem to promise the ease of “I don’t have to do this alone.” We are all alone inside our heads and you – and only you – must be satisfied with the map you create. If you aren’t there’s no fellowship or wealth that can compensate you for that loss.
YOUR OPPORTUNITIES – We revel in and with our fellow travelers. There could be a soulmate among them – for a time or for a life. Accept the wisdom of others, the wisdom of the path, consult other maps in designing your own. Be prepared to alter your map – joyously – with each new and fresh discovery. There will be many. Salut!
HOW I BECAME A WARRIOR: I had three sisters so feel I was really raised by them, rather than by my parents. Each offered a modality for Being that was intriguing to me, the quiet, sensitive, observant one. My eldest sister was very cooperative with my rather demanding parents until it came to her love life, then she slammed the door on them. She was a Love Warrior. My second sister pretended to fulfill parental demands but she was actually full of subversive ideas. She was a Covert Warrior. My little sister just wanted everyone to get along and have a good time. She was a Peace Warrior. And me? I needed lots of alone time to study other people, read, think and design various futures. I was a Thought Warrior. I discovered people have much stronger mental powers than they give themselves credit for, and these powers can be developed.
Planning: My diary has always been my staging area for figuring out what I want to do next, assessing reactions and sketching out scenarios. It helped me learn detachment – I am not locked into any one idea, and because I considered or experimented with something it does not define me. Your key in Strategy Sessions is to cultivate a sense of freedom.
Warrior Danger: People will spend their time trying to get a handle on you so that they can control you, and they are not above using your own training journal to shame you. Don’t let it happen. “These are exercises,” you must tell them, “To develop my flexibility as a warrior I must play with multiple personae. The Life Force requires it.”
Becoming a Warrior: Exercise is important to Warriors, especially thought warriors and introvert warriors. Becoming just a Brain in a slack body is imprisonment. Try out every different sport that is offered to you. The one that worked best for me was dance.
How did the people you admire manifest the Life Force? Jesus spent an epic 40 day & nights in the desert. Margaret Mead lived in Samoa studying the Samoans. Carl Sagan describes his “defining moment” as visiting the World’s Fair at four years old. It exploded and expanded his mind. Who are your models? Research them and study their transitions and experiments.
Magic & Mystery: A you accept yourself and accept your changes, you are confronting the dynamic of change, which is the manifestation of energy in existence. We are all alive and moving. This is a dance and you are the choreographer and star. Erik Erikson said “A good life is like a weaving. Energy is created in the tension. The pull and tug, the struggle, is everything.”
Commit to tiring yourself out during the day with thought, exercise and interrelations so that you can enjoy healthy sleep at night.
Models & Mentors – ‘Every thought has an energy. Thoughts send out a magnetic frequency” – Rhonda Byrne
“Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it – for it is a faculty of the psyche” – Germaine Greer
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration” – Nikola Tesla “The more positive energy you throw into the universe, the more positive energy you get back” – Nitin Namdeo
#Haiku: Catalytic Action
Partake: Energy blooms; Whirlpools Dance; I am Limitless So are you
What It Means If You Choose This Card – Your ego has work to do. Jung tells us that in your dream, you are everyone. You chose the Ego card to start your day. Or did it choose you?
YOU ARE A SEEKER – You are self-defining. You are on a quest. You wish to explore your possible incarnations.
WARRIOR DANGERS– The danger of solipsism is that in turning our eyes inward we miss important signals coming from other people and the world around us. Yet you must “retreat inward” it’s a vital path to self-knowledge and growth.
WARRIOR CHALLENGE -set a Spirituality Schedule to reflect your needs and interests. Appoint time to be absolutely alone, for meditation and reflection. If you cannot find a room to yourself, a closet will do. You can sit in the meditation position or assume any position that allows you to be comfortable enough to become physically forgetful. Concentrate first on building a life that allows both inner and outer growth. Surround yourself with people who respect this decision.
WARRIOR OPPORTUNITY – This is a journey. Accept it. Begin a journal with 1. “I” and write down your meditation thoughts and desires. This can be a poem, a fantasy, a checklist – whatever pattern occurs to you as supportive of your desires. Make a list of goals. Push shame away. This is about YOU. Of course as you evolve, your goals will evolve, and your journal will reflect that. When you have completed your Time Alone – ten minutes to an hour – whatever works for you – pat yourself on the back. What an achievement! You are started on a path of making changing Nightmares into Dreams and making dreams come true.
How I Became a Warrior: Am I me or is my diary me? I’ve been keeping a diary since I was seven years old. My first problem was who I was writing to – that took seven years to solve. (Answer: Me.) My second problem was who I was. I haven’t solved that one yet but since I became a warrior I feel I’m within sighting distance of the answer.
A warrior repels takeover because
A warrior knows what she has to defend
A warrior knows when to let down her guard
A warrior learns from mistakes and hones her art
Planning: Warriors lead a designed life. A diary (also called a Training Journal)offers the ideal format in which to plan. Attempt to quantify the difficulties that you feel and assess possible reactions. Just because a situation is tough does not mean it shouldn’t be explored – on the contrary
Warriors aren’t afraid of difficulty:
Warriors look for opportunities for resistance training
The First Resistance – Often savage, is from yourself. Slowly we realize we have hijackers inside our brains wrestling for control. You can recognize these by their negative content. They clearly wish to subdue us into clones which is NOT HEALTHY.
Becoming a Warrior – It is this resistance that first marks our warrior status. Congratulate yourself. You are on the road.
Training Journal – Carefully assess your desires versus the demands on you. List expected results if you gave in to either. Develop a concept of health. Is ”freedom” staying up all night, consuming whatever substance makes you “feel better”? Clearly not. Assess the negative voice; “You’re weak”, for example. Being “in flight” from the negative voice is actually giving it mastery, you must stand up to it. Learn to answer back – “I’m in training. I did better today than yesterday.” Keep track of your achievements. Even really small ones: “I meditated for 10 minutes” are significant.
Models & Mentors: Always survey possible models. Who do you admire? Is it
Bruce Lee: “The difference between a warrior and an average man is laser focus.”
Is it Carl Jung: “I am not what happened to me I am what I choose to become.” Develop your own models.
Accept mystery: Life isn’t “win or lose.” It can’t be quantified because we are magical souls with magic coursing through us. Sometimes it’s impossible to figure out and must simply be absorbed, not rationalized. Learn to enjoy art and accept the relief it offers. Reflect back as much magic & mystery as you can muster. Your tastes will develop according to your growth – that’s a good thing. Treat yourself like a loving sensei who wants the best for you.
Alysse Aallyn 