18 - The magic, spiritual number.
ONE - The ONENESS that is ALL. All there ever was; All there ever is; All there will ever BE!
(8) INFINITY - The ETERNAL PRESENT Moment. Eternity; Forever!
That which was never born; never dies!
When casting the Runes, you will find illumination in the unlimited possibilities laid out before you.
Many millennia ago in northern Europe, ancient peoples sought a
means to understand their roles in the world at large. They created runes--an
alphabet of symbols that served both as a functional writing system and as a
unique system of divination. Though the symbols themselves were little more
than varying combinations of straight lines carved on natural mediums such as
wood, stone, or bone, these individuals devised a method of comprehending the
past, making sense of the present, and interpreting the future using the
runes as guides. The significance of each symbol was a product of its general
orientation once cast and its location with respect to other runes. In the
present, runes can play the same role in our lives that they played in the
chronicles of distant history. Through them, we open ourselves to a form of
universal guidance that helps us help ourselves.
There are many casting styles, each of which serves an individual function.
Casting a single rune can help you answer specific questions or choose a
daily meditation subject. Three runes, cast during confusing or distressing
situations, provide you with insights into the past, present, and future--as
represented by the first, second, and third runes cast, respectively. A
nine-rune cast can help you understand where you are on your spiritual path.
The runes that land face up relate to your current circumstances and the
events leading up to them, and any runes touching are read as concurrences.
Rune readings, however, are by their very nature subjective and open to
interpretation. Your casting style should reflect your intuitive knowledge of
your needs. Grabbing a handful of runes to cast at random can be just as
effective as choosing a set number to cast.
Whether you buy your runes or carve them yourself is less important than your
sincere desire to understand the messages conveyed to you via this alphabet
of enlightenment. Your intentions will have a direct impact on the wisdom you
receive while casting. The runes are representative of forces outside of the
realm of human understanding, so your intent will act as your anchor. By
simply reading the runes, you will find illumination in the unlimited
possibilities laid out before you in each new cast.
In the last decade, there’s been a trend in the New Age spirituality circles.
When we feel sad, bad, or mad, we put “love and light” on it as a prayer and remedy.
We usually say this to offer a way to see past the darkness of whatever situation a person is in. So we send “love” and then we send “light” in efforts to clear away the clouds, so to speak.
Now, “love and light” is beautiful medicine, and we really do need more of it right now. But as with all medicine, if we don’t take or use it properly, it can actually cause harm.
It was a few years back when someone first told me to put “love and light” on my pain. I had been deep in the middle of a breakdown and couldn’t see my way out of it. Looking back, things were stirring up and needing to surface. But I just couldn’t see it all yet.
A friend, noticing my pain, told me not to focus on it; rather, I should put prayers of “love and light” around me and all would be well. She might’ve meant well, but it really jarred my system and something didn’t feel right about it at all.
Here’s the thing, we are all wounded, all of us. And very few of us know how to cope, treat, or heal those wounds. But we are learning. In fact, our learning curve has never been steeper than it is right now.
But while I appreciate the sentiment of love and light, there are moments when directing it to a wound is like throwing a Band-Aid on an infection and hoping it will magically disappear.
Love and light, as a medicine, has to be applied at the right time and for the right reasons. Looking back at my breakdown, I was not at a point where “love and light” were helpful to me at all. Instead, I needed to sit in the darkness with my pain, and not run from it. I needed encouragement that this journey into my darkness was real, healthy, and required.
When not to put “love and light” on a wound
What we’re really talking about are emotional wounds. Physical wounds are more accessible because we can see them, and as a culture, we know more about treating them. But emotional wounds—this is new territory for us.
My breakdown was prompted by deep emotional wounds from childhood trauma. I knew what happened, but I had forgotten or couldn’t access the feeling memory of it.
Many of us have sustained trauma as children and some of us have zero memory of it. Others may have a logical memory, but not a feeling memory. This means, we know what happened on a logical level, but we’ve forgotten the feeling of it.
Our psychological protection system helps us forget because we can’t manage the weight of it on our young nervous systems.
But this wound festers over time, and we get to a place where we need to heal it in our adult years. My breakdown was my body and soul telling me, “This wound is hurting me, and I need to dig it up and look at it.” But at that time, I didn’t know what the wound was about, only that I was experiencing pain that had no explanation.
This, my friends, is not the right time to put love and light on a wound.
When to put “love and light” on a wound
A wound needs to breathe first. It needs air, cleaning, acknowledgment, and time to be seen. It needs to be known and understood. When we put “love and light” on a wound before we’ve done any of this, it only festers further.
At this point, “love and light” is the same as abandoning our wounds, and thus, we abandon ourselves. We want it gone because we can’t stand the pain. And this is why we feel weird when we’re told to cover our darkness with “love and light.”
Not only does this not work, but it also delays our healing, creating more profound and complex scars that cause further damage to our lives.
During my breakdown, I needed time to go inside my wounds and uncover what wasn’t known to me. What happened to me? That was first and foremost. We can’t heal anything we know nothing about.
So I embarked on a long journey of discovery where I allowed the darkness to surface in its own time. Most importantly, I allowed the darkness to be dark, without needing to fix, cover, or make it nicer than it was.
Sometimes we know what happened to us and that’s great. But we still need to remember the feeling of it. How did we feel at the time the trauma occurred? How do we feel about it now? Where in our bodies can the trauma be felt? All of these questions I had to ask myself and slowly discover the answers over time.
Then, once we pull up all the logical and feeling memories about our wounds, only then can we put love and light on it, my friends. Only at that time does the “love and light” medicine give us precisely what we need.
We may be tempted at this point to stay within the darkness of it. To fester with reasons, the why’s, the “how could this happen to me.” But there’s no point to any of that. And that’s where “love and light” are transformational.
Because once the wound is revealed, “love and light” ensures that we remain with the joyful parts of ourselves while making sure that the wound never goes into hiding again.
For me, once I got through the excavation part, I found that I could respond to wishes and prayers for “love and light” much better. It made sense to me then. Because my pain was seen and understood, “love and light” no longer felt like a silencing tactic, but actual medicine.
Why do we often put “love and light” on our wounds before the time is right?
For one, we’re just confused. As I said, we don’t know a lot about emotional wounds and how to heal them.
But more so, we just don’t want to deal with these wounds at all. It’s so painful to dredge up those logical and feeling memories. And we are just so conditioned to avoid this stuff, aren’t we?
We don’t understand, and we don’t really want to feel any of it, so “love and light” seem like the best way to cope. It’s all relatively innocent, and most of the time, we have good intentions.
But now, we need to understand the “love and light” medicine so we can use it properly in the service of our well-being.
When “love and light” is weaponized
Here’s where it gets tricky, my friends. There’s an unfortunate trend going around these days where “love and light” are actually being weaponized to silence people.
We can’t let this happen, because “love and light” medicine is not meant to be weaponized; it’s supposed to be used for good.
When I say “weaponized,” I’m referring to people who tell others to just put “love and light” on things before they’re ready. Often this is done right at the time when their wounds are beginning to surface. It is used as a silencing mechanism rather than the good medicine that it is.
People do this for one reason only: because our wounds bring up their wounds. In some ways, this can be helpful because we often see ourselves in each other, and this can help further our self-discovery.
But often, people prefer to run away and hide, and they don’t like it when other people’s wounds touch their own. Sometimes they even feel guilty, which makes them angry. So they use “love and light” to silence the other, so they don’t have to feel their own pain.
We are seeing this more and more these days as people are speaking up about sexual assault, misogyny, racism, and many other traumas that have been silenced for generations.
I think my friend thought she was trying to help me during my breakdown. But she didn’t realize that my pain made her uncomfortable. When she told me to turn away from my pain in favor of “love and light,” it was a silencing mechanism and that’s why it didn’t feel right to me.
If you do this, please take a moment to understand the pain inside of you and work on healing and feeling for yourself. Know that pain is not the enemy. In fact, it’s something we all feel and have to sort through at some point in our lives.
If you want to truly help, you can simply say, “I hear you.” I promise those words will mean everything to the person in pain.
And if someone has silenced you with “love and light,” recognize that they’re in pain too and they don’t want to feel it. Something in you has triggered something profound for them. The safest thing to do is to wish them kindness, leave them to their own space, and go tend your own wounds.
“Love and light” is amazing medicine, and we do need it more than ever.
But we need to use it at the right time and for the right reasons.
First, we must feel and understand our wounds. And even though it’s hard, we often need to roam in the darkness with our wounds in order to understand them fully.
This can take a lot of time, and we may need the support from a trusted therapist or energy worker to help us through this. We can’t rush it and we can’t put more Band-Aids on top of it.
Then, once we’ve excavated and exposed the wound and all its darkness, only then can we shower the wound with “love and light” medicine.
And actually, when the time is right, “love and light” can become the most transformative and healing medicine of all.
Some ideas on how to exercise when you really don’t want to:
1. Make sure you are getting enough sleep.
Your body probably won’t be fantastically interested in starting a new exercise routine if you are chronically tired. Sort that out.
2. Understand what you are willing to give up to undertake exercise.
Yes, there is advice to work out an hour a day—but to go from zero to 60 (literally) is a stretch for most adults with busy lives and habits and schedules. Mathematically, 60 minutes for activity “x” requires that you give up activity “y” for 60 minutes.
Time does not create itself by magic simply because you’ve decided to exercise. Know thyself and what you are substituting, and my suggestion is to choose portions of the day when your time is less productive or essential.
Giving up Facebook for exercise is a good trade. Giving up time to manage cleaning or cooking or errands or social life or time with your kids likely won’t a long-term plan make.
3. Start small.
Take on a smaller commitment that you can achieve and grow, rather than a larger commitment that will fail and shrink.
Remember that 60 minutes? Yeah, I don’t exercise for 60 minutes a day. I do 28, because I can reliably commit to 28, succeed every day, and increase it if I want. That’s 3.2 hours a week. In the past, I was stuck on an hour and many weeks got into a failure cycle and did zero. Give yourself something that you can reasonably do.
4. Do what you like with whomever you like.
Don’t like running? Skip. Very few of us will engage with people or things we actively don’t enjoy during our leisure time.
Move on and find what you do like. Try different disciplines and instructors; there’s literally something and someone out there for everyone.
5. Try temptation bundling.
I don’t love cleaning; I’m bad at it, and it can make me get flustered. One of my coaches gave me an amazing tip to turn on a podcast while I clean. I want to listen to podcasts; I don’t really want to clean. By bundling “I can only listen to podcasts while I clean,” I now successfully clean every morning. Exercise is well-bundled with podcasts, TV, or music.
6. Focus on the sensations of the process rather than the sensations of the results.
Results-oriented exercise is great—but if you were truly, legitimately motivated by the promise of your body looking great in a bathing suit, you would be at the gym right now. You can capitalize on the fact that that’s not your motivation, and that you likely are a person who needs to enjoy the journey instead.
You are the 80 percent of people who have the opportunity to find something enjoyable in its own right, rather than simply doing it for the perceived reward. Find something you find inherently rewarding as you’re doing it.
If your thought was “lying on the couch,” there are exercises for that too.
"You just wake up one morning and you got it!" Moms Mabley
I am so busy living I do not think about getting old. I am so grateful in my recovery from alcoholism that tomorrow, the future, and age are secondary. In my sickness, I was always living in the future: What will tomorrow bring? Will I die crippled, lonely, and afraid? My projections into the future produced emotional pain. Today I do not need to do this. I welcome age because I bring into it the joy and experience of my sobriety. My spiritual program reminds me to be grateful for my life, and this includes the inevitability of aging.
Lord, as I grow in age,may I also grow in wisdom and tolerance.
Every day brings
something new in your lives. There is never a dull moment for changes are
taking place all the time, always changes for the very best.
There are new vibrations being released, which raise your consciousness. Be
ever open to these vibrations. Go with them, work in harmony with them and
grow in strength and stature as you do so, moving all the time into another
dimension which enables you to see what is happening in a new light, which
keeps your eyes open so you can see My hand in everything. So you give
constant thanks for all that is being brought about.
I’m staring at my five-year-old child, amazed at how long it takes to get dressed into pajamas for bedtime.
Or really, how well he stalls at the activity.
“Ms. Allie said that we don’t have to go to school tomorrow, that we can fake being sick if we want to,” is the response I receive after instructing him to go get his toothbrush.
“She did, huh?” my husband responds. The next night, after the kid went to a full day of school, I learn the boys have schemed for us to watch “Ferris Bueller’s Day off,” the 1980s classic movie that features an extremely charismatic teenage boy skipping school, fooling the mean principal Mr. Rooney, and gallivanting around the city of Chicago with his best friend and girlfriend.
A sucker for movies that comfort me, and this surely was one of them, I was all in. We put the toddler down to bed after he demanded half of his brother’s ice cream sandwich, and watched Ferris, Cameron, and Sloan rule the windy city.
~
This January, I participated in the trendy “Dry January” that began in the United Kingdom a number of years back. Abstaining completely from alcohol. A reboot after the holidays. A mental cleanse. Relearning how to alleviate stress and work without one’s preferred glass of booze.
Removing the wine or beer from my diet has not been physically difficult. I would consider myself to be a somewhat “normal” drinker, although, I have been drinking more to relieve stress during the holidays and to relieve…motherhood…than I think I should. I enjoyed drinking socially. That was the most uncomfortable part of this journey for me: learning to be comfortable around other people drinking without a drink in my hand.
Because I know it makes people who are drinking uncomfortable. Because I know they immediately start reflecting on their own drinking when someone else says they are doing Dry January. Because I know I am less likely to receive invites to social events that include drinking. Because are we even fun if we don’t drink? Because they surely know that I am expecting baby number three because I’m not drinking. Because they are wondering if I had a secret big drinking problem before, and because what exactly makes it a drinking problem and do they have a secret big drinking problem themselves?
Because, all the things.
I really enjoyed Dry January and that’s been refreshing. I visited my best friend of 25 years in Phoenix and experienced laughing fits and inappropriate phrases and dancing hip rocking to retrieve balloons from ceilings all while being as sober and carefree as a hyper pre-schooler. I’ve been in more patient moods with my husband and kids. I’ve attended dinners and birthday parties (where drinks are always involved) and had genuinely good times. I’ve had some really good sex. I’ve had some really good sleep. I’ve ventured out to a neighboring city with both my young kids to have lunch with a new friend who I had kept promising I would come see. I willingly took my two young boys out to lunch. By myself.
I had a super deep conversation and tearful conversation with someone extremely important to me. I’ve lost a few pounds and have better skin and eyeballs. I do keep finding grey hairs but that is beyond my control. I let my hairdresser take the wheel on that one.
Completely abstaining has created an awareness of noticing alcohol and its permeation everywhere. In a large volume of Insta-stories. In the aisle bookend of Target in aluminum cans labeled “Day-drinking Lager.” In commercials with two young dudes, cracking Saturday morning beers and the brewery asking the viewer to make them their “Saturday Morning Beer.” I wasn’t aware we needed to choose a Saturday morning beer?
I also take more notice of everything around me, not just alcohol. People’s intolerance of one another in traffic, on social media. A general feeling of sadness, or despair as we go through the daily repetitions of our lives. A sensation that something is missing, something really important, something we can all feel but can’t quite pin down.
So there we are, cuddled together on our old couch, watching “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He grasps every adventure possible. He wills his stubborn and sick best friend out of bed, pours himself iced tea in a fancy poolside pineapple glass, sneaks his girlfriend out of school, dines as Abe Froman at a fancy French joint sipping iced water from a wine glass, attends a Cubs game, chants “hey bata-bata-bata sawing batter,” catches a fly ball, stars in a parade, recovers Cameron from a catatonic state while eating Oreos and drinking a Pepsi (not the healthiest choices but also not booze), witnesses his best friend breaking down emotionally over the state of his relationship with his father, allows the pain to come out, observes as the friend releases his anger on his father’s perfectly restored Ferrari, and races through back yards to beat his parents back to his room.
My point in this recap is the man-child did all of this one hundred percent completely sober. Sure, it’s a dramatization of what a day off of school (or work) can look like. Sure, it took a lot of creative writers and talented actors to make it happen. But the point is, the movie was a smashing success because of the purity of the human spirit depicted in every scene without the need for the addictive substance being always within arm’s reach, like a child’s teddy bear they cannot do without.
What I have come to slowly realize over the course of the last six weeks is this: I was under the illusion that alcohol was helping me when it was hurting the good in me. It’s fooling me into believing it must be present—at all times—to have fun and to feel alive. To feel safe and comfortable. To feel courageous and brave. Why is it that we’re afraid to learn that without it?
So, when Dry January ended and we entered into the following month, I have dubbed it Merry February. Perhaps the next month will be Mocktail March. Let us continue taking life as it reveals itself and trusting the visceral feeling of freedom that comes with learning to be our full selves again. Maybe we will come to realize it’s okay to do things differently than we used to and these decisions allow us to catch the shooting stars hidden behind the clouds of a dark night.
It is also one hell of a reason to re-examine Ferris’ sentiment:
“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
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