New moon in June reading with the Tao Oracle

Lately I've been meditating more regularly again. My practice was buried under too much worrying and feeling restless and so forth. Working with the last Embrace card “No-Thingness” has been very revealing to me.  I've discovered the more anxious and stressed out I am the less I do the things which could be healing for me, like prayer, meditation or just sit and do nothing. So now I've picked up my meditation practice (again) and so far so good. Before I start with the actual meditation I like to visualize a circle with elemental symbolism like colors, forces of nature, animals, goddesses, seasons etc. (not all at once of course J). This separates me from my daily hustle.

Any way after my meditation instead of picking up my The Osho Zen Tarot as usual I've pulled my Release and Embrace card for the coming lunation from The Tao Oracle by the same artist: Ma Deva Padma. 

Release: Work on what has been spoiled

Embrace;  Opposition

At first I was bit confused because It seemed as if the two cards had to be drawn just the other way around: to release oppositions and misunderstandings and to embrace healing and restoring the balance  But then I realized this is exactly what the cards are telling me. My first automatic response to a situation is to try to make things right for everybody. To restore the balance, to clean up the mess so we can move one like nothing has happened. Everything for the sake of peace.  Often I feel very uncomfortable if there is a conflict, a tension or even a difference in opinion. So this will be my challenge for this lunation: to let things be as they are for a while and let others work out their own issues without me coming to the rescue. And perhaps even more to be able to have and to keep my own viewpoints without letting myself be talked over by everybody else for the sake of harmony and balance. 

Excess: too much of everything will get you nothing in the end

Tao Oracle

After several days using the tarot for my daily draws, I have drawn the card for today from the Tao oracle by Ma Deva Padma (the artist of the Osho Zen Tarot)

Well this card is surely a wake-up call on various levels.

The man is crouched and almost crushed by the overload on his back. When you look closely everything is stacked neatly and there is even a tree growing on the top so I wonder how long he has been carrying this enormous burden.

When we keep going and keep adding to the load we all know we can go on like this for a long time until we reach our breaking point and believe me, we will reach it. The question is do we learn from it. Or do we recover and pick up the cause of our burn-out and carry on as if nothing has happened.

I have to be honest, it took me a couple of times to get it (one less urgent than the other, but still). I also can say, I've learned a lot and I hope I won’t get burned-out anymore. But of course there are still a lot of excesses in my life. One of them is my obsession with secondhand tarot decks.  I keep checking secondhand sites for new adds more and more. Since I was able to quit smoking last year I think I can manage to reduce this addiction to normal levels. This is just a minor excess and there are more of course, but the point is, they can grow slowly without noticing and suddenly you could be on the verge of breaking. Therefore it is so important to really take a close look at yourself from time to time and question your  motives, your desires and be honest about your limitations, your levels of stress and to sort out what you really want and need to be happy without having to feel guilty or ashamed because we’re only human.