The Healing Arts: 18 Things Healers Learn, #12; You Choose Your Dues

Life extracts its toll. Period.

No one escapes trials. They look different for each person. Trauma is relative. The child who comes from a very loving home and environment can be traumatized by something that would seem, to the child growing up in the ghetto, as less-than nothing.

Yet, it isnt nothing. For regardless the cause, when your overriding reality is suddenly disrupted by something unexpected, the reverberations live inside you for a while. There is no set time limit on how long you reel from the aftereffects of any one incident. It takes as long as it takes.

The only variable in the equation is your choice. And it is your choice to compress, eliminate or expand the time it takes you to move away from the cycle of your pain. It is your choice to stay locked into the past or future, or living inside the present moment.

Working within the healing arts exposes you to trauma of all sorts. It is virtually impossible to insulate yourself completely from the pain of others. To compound matters even more, healers often must run through repetitive internal gauntlets of personal doubts about their abilities, skills, sensitivities, and, yes, even intention.

It can be an extremely vicious circle when self-doubt creeps in to the work youre called upon to do. It can begin through any number of ways, but a sure-fire entry point is that place where you accept there are dues to be paid.

In some situations, dues are simply an exchange for services: In return for this, you must pay that. But in a lot of cases, the concept is expanded to include something like if you want to do this, then you have to pay just like that. In essence, dues are a statement that this and that are the way things are; for me, for you, for everybody.

Thats where the problem occurs. When you accept someone elses definition of dues (or their way of paying them), as your own, you are living their life, not yours.

Just like with natural consequences, there are natural dues. But they are written in broad strokes implying that, of course, there truly is a passageway and cost to gaining any kind of knowledge and experience. Paradoxically, while dues in general are not specific, the passageways and toll booths leading to them are very specifically designed for the individual.

Thats why the dues for you are not necessarily the dues for me. Even though, for example, we both want to be good Doctors, its going to take you a whole different set of lessons than me to get there.

And dont forget, this concept runs both ways. As you must free yourself from adopting others paths without taking the time to adapt them to your particular needs, you must also free others to find their own ways without imposing your definition of dues on them.

When you choose to enter into agreement with the concept there are dues to be paid that conform to a fixed, outward-driven criteria whether this be with yourself or others -- you are moving as if there is only one way to gain experience.

Where that falls flat is that it eliminates the factors of choice and your ability to affect both your circumstances and your attitude. These are among the most powerful tools at your disposal. To impose the concept of dues on them is to choke your potential.

As a healer, it is of paramount importance to live within the what is of the moment. That means maintaining freedom from any assumptions or expectations of how things will work out, or, by extension, what they will cost.

Believing that in any one situation you are just paying your dues implies that youre enduring what is happening now, rather than doing something to create a new moment.

Things do happen and you do get affected. These are the dues of life. It is ongoing. Things happen every moment. You are affected every moment. And though we may guess at how long any one particular incident may continue its effect, or how that will specifically manifest itself, we never really know; not for ourselves, not for others.

Dues are, by definition, that which is deserved, or owed. It does not mean that which has been pre-determined. When we lock ourselves into a belief system that were just paying our dues were prolonging our time in a place of reaction rather than action.

Never should we discount the experience of others, but neither should we cling to it as something that defines our own paths. So pay your dues, to people, to situations, to your God, but only that which is earned or deserved. As long as it serves you, as long as theres an even exchange, its worth it. But when the balance gets off kilter, its time to start to seek an approach that frees, rather than constricts you.

Russ Reina shares over 35 years of experience in the healing arts through his web site http://mauihealingartist.com It is a potent resource for those wishing to deepen their abilities in connection and develop their powers as healers. For a powerful free tool to explore your inner world, please check out his adjunct site http://thestoryofthis.net

(Permission is granted to reprint this article, unedited, provided proper attribution is made and the signature line -- the above resource paragraph -- is kept intact)

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Tarot Cards as Alternative Therapy

Whether we admit or not, most of us have quaint notions of what tarot cards are.

On the surface, they are merely a deck of illustrated cards used in predictions, while the tarot card reader is an eccentric person dressed in robes seated behind the fortune-telling booth in the town fair. This image of tarot cards is, of course, clichd, and yet we'd rather feel comfortable with its familiarity than dig deeper. We resort to the more convenient explanation rather than actually investigate the sometimes unpleasant yet gratifying truth of tarot cards.

Perhaps, the most famous among the tarot cards is the Death Card, a card quite unfairly invested with too much negative meanings and energies behind it, so much so that we usually think of tarot cards as tools of the occult, vehicles of evil even. While we can't deny the fact that indeed tarot can be used for such purposes, tarot cards can also be perfectly well-intentioned and can be actually used for good causes.

As a matter of fact, the earliest use of tarot cards in fifteenth century Italy was as a game, much like a deck of regular playing cards but with the addition of trump cards. It wasn't until late 17th or 18th century that tarot cards began to take on a more serious role in divination.

Over the years, the pictures in the tarot cards, their rich symbolisms, procedures, purposes, and meanings evolved in such a way that the characters portrayed in them have come to mirror all our follies, fears, strengths, and hopes. By stringing them together into a tale, we are able to retell and uncover the past as we would have liked it unfold, as well as get a sense of a manageable future we can feel safe with.

A radical and inevitable shift indeed for tarot cards from a simple game to life-changing therapy.

Carl Jung, a world renowned psychologist has always considered tarot as an alternative psychotherapy. By utilising the rich imagery encapsulated in every tarot card, we are able to voice out our concerns, look into our past, and prepare for the future. In some cases, children who don't yet know how to speak can use the images and characters in the tarot deck to piece together their thoughts and tell their story. Tarot cards then offer an alternative language system through which we can bring our Unconscious up to the light.

Jung explains that tarot cards represent different archetypes of human personality and situations. The Death Card then is not just simplistically a dreary card foretelling iretractable death to the querent (person who asks questions in a tarot card reading). Rather, the death card can be seen as the death, an end of something inside us: a vice, long standing pain, bad habits, sorrow, signaling rebirth.

We do not just blindly pick out cards from the tarot deck. Every moment of our lives we are armed with choices, choices that spell out and define our fate. It's not just what you keep out from your life that matters; it's also what you allow to make a difference. Even if they're just a deck of tarot cards.

Neoli Lance Marcos writes for PsychicGuild: online provider of daily horoscope, dream interpretation and tarot card readings.

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