I had a bit of a revelation the other week when I was pulling my cards. Every day I pull a card from 4 decks as a way to help me focus on a particular aspect of my life for that day. While I was shuffling my Tarot deck, 2 cards popped out. This was the Universe telling me that these two were the cards I needed. One was The Magician, upright and the other was Judgement, also upright. Two heavy hitters and this just days after I pulled the Tower card!
For those unfamiliar with the Tarot, I will explain. According to the book I use to interpret the Tarot, The Magician is about “pioneering, initiating change, communicating persuasively, consciously creating your reality...working wonders.” Okay. I’ll just put that right on my To Do list. Today: work wonders.
But wait, there’s more!
Judgement. It sounds a bit aggressive, but according to my book, it is about “awakening to your purpose”. “Judgement, the archetype of callings, the summons to a new life.” That’s handy as the other one seems to have crashed and burned. (Tower) It is “...the finding of a more authentic way of being.”
This is about transformation. Somehow, I am supposed to magically transform my life. It’s not like I had anything better to do.
Now, how much would you pay??
Transformation. It’s a big word. Has lots of letters. But where do you start? And what happens once you have transformed your life? Is that it? Do you just hang around in your transformed state being an example to others and waving good will to one and all, as if you were the Queen? How am I supposed to dramatically change my life when I have already changed it beyond all recognition?
Then it hit me, as most revelations do, quiet-like. It was like looking at the Rubin vase and suddenly seeing two people facing each other. I’ve already done this. 14 years ago I was living in England, working as a database manager, I had 1 massage in my life, had no idea anything called energy work existed and had just started taking yoga.
How the heck did I get from there to living in the US owning my own body and energy work practice, teaching people Reiki and Intuition?
“...finding a more authentic way of being.”
I thought about the events that lead me here and a pattern emerged. They all had one thing in common: my passion for learning and growth. Every time I put myself in the path of learning something new, an opportunity would pop up to make my life even fuller.
What can I say? I’m a nerd.
The great thing was that I didn’t actually have to change who I am. I just had to do what I loved and was passionate about. In a weird kind of way, the more I transformed, the more I stayed the same. I just started becoming a bigger version of the real me. A bit like the Russian dolls, but in reverse.
The other thing I realized was that transformation doesn’t necessarily mean dramatic change for a couple of reasons. First, not all dramatic changes are created equal. Second, transformation is an ongoing process that never really stops.
Two events in that time stick out in my mind as transformational. One was my choice to attend the Mind Body Spirit Expo in London with a friend one fine spring day, and the other was to move back to the States after about 10 years of living abroad. On the face of it, moving back to the States seems like a much larger, far-reaching, terrifying and, let’s face it, dramatic event than attending an Expo for a day.
However, it wasn’t the move that started me going in a completely different direction than I had been going. The Expo opened me up to the wonderful world of complementary and alternative therapies, some of which I had no idea existed. It was where I first got the idea about going back to school to refresh my anatomy and physiology and possibly learn massage. (Here’s that passion for learning.) A big leap, but at the time it appeared quite small.
Once I was introduced to the idea of seeing my life through a very different lens, seeing all sorts of new possibilities, I then needed to act on them. I needed to take the classes, (my way of going into strange territory because I love to learn) practicing what I learned, and meet mentors and teachers that helped me to become more self aware. (More learning! Yay!) This allowed me to see that I needed to start a new phase of my life that was going to take place back in my original country. The move itself, although transformational, was the culmination of the choices I made as a direct or indirect result of going to the Expo, and may have never happened otherwise.
If you do a side by side comparison of then and now, sure, it looks like I underwent some sort of personality transplant. The reality is that it took me about 14 years to do it. Not exactly overnight. What seems like a dramatic change in the last 14 years was actually a series of events that look both dramatic and really quite innocuous.
So, here I am, back to magically transforming my life. The good news is, I don’t necessarily have to do anything drastically different. It may be just seeing what I am already doing in a different way. A bit like taking a small turn to the left rather than an about face. That doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t turn my life upside down again.
Well, I guess I better follow my nose and see what interesting opportunities for learning come my way. Oh look. I pulled another Tower card. Magnificent!
What do you love to do? What are you passionate about? You never know. You might just start transforming your life.
