A Non-Sectarian Approach to the Everyday Sacred
“You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, bread, and depth.
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you—a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, look ‘You’re in sleepy land. Wake. Come on a trip. There’s a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not being touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.’ And so it starts.”
I’ve finally come to understand why this deck of cards and all that will stem from it is important. It’s because we are all searching for something, something more. What we’re really searching for is ourselves. More than that, it’s the part of ourselves that exits as part of the sacredness of life, whether we define it as that or not. It’s that part of us that creates and loves and grows. The only way that we can do that with intention is to become aware of the selves we have come to know and then to grow beyond that. We expand into deeper and bigger parts of ourselves. I understand why self awareness is key to changing everything in us and on this planet. This is fundamentally what I'm talking about with everything I offer and if I look at the subtext on the title of my cards it really fits. The Intuitive Insight Oracle Cards (IIOC): a self-awareness tool for interested humans. It’s not all highfalutin and unreachable for the everyday person and that’s the point. It has to be accessible and based on a foundation of simple principles. It helps when it’s approached with humour and a light heart. This is for people who are interested enough to ask the questions.
There are a lot of people out there who are already into deep spiritual grooves and are really anchored into the contemplative and the mystical traditions. We need these people, in fact I suppose in a way I'm one of them. Certainly not a mystic, but definitely contemplative. We need those, but what we also need is something to reach people who are looking for it but don't quite know what ‘it’ is or how to get it; or who've been reading about it but can't practicalize it in a way where they can experience it in daily life. This approach is fundamentally about bringing awareness of the sacred as a concept. More importantly it’s about integrating the experience of the sacred into one's physical reality; into one's body, into one's being and into one's everyday life, as opposed to living it with one foot on either side of the line (one side the personality/ego and the other side the spiritual self). That way lends itself to a ‘ping-ponging’ between thought and feeling rather than an integrated mind/heart experience. There are, of course, people out there already taking time to integrate these two states and they're doing it through ways that are maybe less deliberately defined or marketed as that, but do have essentially the same possibility of creating that connection.
Some people find integration through exercise, through yoga and Tai Chi and through all sorts of different kinds of body awareness experiences that help bring them into a deeper understanding of who they are within the body and beyond the body/personality. It can happen through using techniques and through journaling and writing and art - any kind of creative endeavours that move people more into the parts of their brain that allow for an expanded vision and an expanded awareness of who they are and the multidimensionality of life. I daresay that many people slip in and out of that state quite naturally as they focus on things that bring them into their heart. This can happen quite automatically when you’re in nature or looking at a beloved pet. For me, the moment of powerful integration comes when we realize that we’re IN that integrated state - when we observe ourselves feeling something open and awesome - literally awesome, like a breathtaking sunrise. How do we experience dimensions beyond the ‘table and chair’ reality of everyday living, which has been structured by a mind that is existing largely through habitual patterns, without self-reflection to question the value and the enjoyment or the social conditioning which motivate them?
© Lynn Walden, 2024.
It's taken me some time to identify what my focus actually is. Like many habitual thoughts, they become so familiar as to cease being identified as active ingredients in how we live our lives. In truth, the yearning for deeper meaning and the nature of self reflection began so long ago that I took for granted that everyone did that. My Mother, telling me as a kid that I ‘thought too much’ should have been a clue but alas, no! It’s taken me many years of exploration, disappointment, moments of deep despair and moments of soul shaking joy to understand the varied nature of how we humans define love, faith, compassion and hurt - and more importantly how we manage to continue living in the midst of it all.
Moving into a therapeutic/teaching role was certainly as much for my own well being as it was for any of my clients/students. In fact it's what the cards were about in the beginning: creating a system for people to be able to stay in touch with themselves in relation to the world around them, with an awareness that gave them choices about their behaviors and their intentionality. This is for people who either already have a framework or a belief system that they experience but don't live it in a particularly integrated way. It’s for people who are going through self-investigation through psychotherapy, through somato-emotional work of any kind, or basically for anybody who's questioning the nature of their life and why it isn't more fulfilling or easier. I began reflecting on the flow/stuck phases in my life and questioned what moved me into flow and what held me back. How did I investigate those issues in my personality or in my relationships, in a way that moved me forward and grew me into a more solidly comfortable place in myself? The next step was to understand how I used my experiences of life (both nice and not so nice) to learn and develop agency beyond my subconscious motivations - somewhere where I had taken the hurts of the past (known and unknown), and used them as something that was designed not so much to be fixed as to be used as learning tools for expansion of consciousness.
What is the value of an expanded consciousness?
Why is it worth the discomfort that is so often involved in deliberate self awareness, self inventory? The answer is very simple; it’s the ability to live from a more fully compassionate heart. It's a fully compassionate heart, not in a way that makes you a dish rag or a doormat, but a compassionate heart that allows you to lovingly set boundaries for yourself.
While implementation of this can be uncomfortable and a bit clumsy, ideally it’s setting boundaries kindly and with integrity, trusting that as you do what is absolutely in alignment with what is best for your well being it will ultimately create a situation that will be the best for all concerned. The big question, of course, is how you get in touch with that. How do you know when you’re acting from your true heart, coming from a compassionate higher consciousness and when it is just your personality ego consciousness? That's a key question and understanding and discerning it is part of what this work is about. I’ve studied with many people over the years, from energy workers to therapists to Mystics. Sometimes it's been in person, sometimes it's been online and sometimes it's been through reading their books. I've experienced many forms of therapy myself and worked with many different physical techniques of exercise. While I'm not an expert on many of these modalities, what I am an expert on is understanding the intrinsic value of them and how they may be well placed in a person's life to move someone forward. I don't mean to say that it’s just movement forward because it becomes much more than that, it’s expansion.
Choosing to be self aware demands a journey inward, but it’s not where you stay, it’s simply where you anchor yourself and expand from. After a much examined life, what I’ve come to understand is that expansion is also very much about inclusion. This is not about simply moving from Hopscotch square one to two to three and eventually landing at the end where you turn around and mindlessly repeat the same steps. This is integrating those steps so that you can move from Hopscotch to another game altogether. And whether or not the individual steps are all held in very clear and immediate conscious accessibility, energetically the integration of them as experiences prevents them from being the dark places in ourselves that continue to motivate us from our subconscious mind. Recently, in a quiet reflective moment I experienced a sudden feeling as though all of my life was gently swirling around me within my energy and through my entire home. None of it was harsh or rejected and none of it was resented or regretted, because in that moment I understood the beauty of living life in all of its dimensions. I understood that it is ultimately all of those things, good and bad that has brought me to a place of greater understanding of myself, life, the human condition and of the need for compassion. It’s helped me understand the beauty of compassion.
Compassion is a need, because it brings beauty into everything it embraces.
Compassion by its very nature IS beauty. Navigating compassion for ourselves while still offering it to others is an art. It is something we’re all worthy of receiving and capable of developing as a foundational attitude towards ourselves. The brilliant and beautiful thing about compassion is that when we maintain that attitude towards ourselves, we naturally want to offer it to others. That is perhaps the most beautiful part of it. It is inclusive because there is within it an understanding at a very deep level, that we are all in this together. No matter how much we may vilify somebody or revere somebody, we are all ultimately dealing with the same range of emotions, pains, joys, hopes and fears. They show up differently in all of us but it's pretty much all the same notes in varying melodies or colors of different shades.
This is why self awareness is essential. Until we understand ourselves enough to forgive, love and value who we are in totality of our achievements and our flaws, how can we offer that to another? We may think of it as small scale acts of kindness, but since we are all connected within the energetic matrix of this living world, any change that moves us to compassion and inclusivity has an effect on the world at large and this includes the environment, and the politics that dictate so many of the rules that either destroy life or enhance it. This is not just about me and you and our family and neighbours. This is about Life—capital L—and how you wish to experience it and influence it. Getting back to the root of this, the beginning, I’ll chance to remind you that the sacred essence of each one of us is what connects us and guides us ever gently towards our deeper selves, our truest essence in which all compassion and joy and Love exists as the foundation of our being.
Whether or not you subscribe to this metaphysical or spiritual idea, I ask you this:
Is living life, believing in just the possibility that you can experience increasing peace, joy, fulfillment, harmony and love going to make life better and more enjoyable? Well yes! Of course! Because your choice to believe in the possibility of positive change, and the decision to act as though it can, changes your body chemistry to healthier ones. It will alter the neural patterns which create more positive frameworks through which you’ll interpret life events. Thoughts are magnetic and science has proven that what we focus on, we WILL see more of (check out a cool little aspect of the brain called the Reticular Activating System, if you doubt my claims). In keeping with the magnetic nature of thought energy, we will begin attracting experiences and people that mirror these newer beliefs. So while I can quote endless experts on this, I’ll leave it to you to investigate. It’s not up to me to convince you. I figure that my job is to offer the possibility for change and to give you the option of using one of the tools that integrate a bunch of the things that have helped me and my clients and students over the years. If it gives you a fraction of what it’s provided to me alone, then I can say, “Job well done Lynn!” I hope you can too.
If you’re not sold on the idea of using or buying the cards, or using the deck on your own, I’ll be providing more articles and YouTube videos incorporating some of the tools and concepts in the cards. It’s still ‘play in progress’ as I’m moving out of hopscotch mode and into contemporary/interpretive dance mode as a general theme in my life. Please keep a look out or sign up for notifications as I create new options…for interested humans.