This week, our resilience card is Healing from Resilience Alchemy. What might it mean for us to explore healing this week? What might be in need of some healing attention and what might this process entail? Perhaps there is something within or around you aching for some tender, loving touch. Perhaps it’s time to explore your own personal definition of healing and how you can claim and celebrate this capacity within yourself.
Often, when I shuffle the cards for these readings, I speak aloud some words of prayer or intention. This week I asked for guidance to help us find comfort and safety in the coming days. The holidays can be difficult for many of us, and the grief and sadness blanketing the world right now is an additional, collective burden. So I shuffled and pulled this card with curiosity, but also a certain amount of soft, largely unfocused desperation. I wanted the right card to come in answer. I wanted to be given an answer for how to fix the world—no matter how naive or illogical that desire may be.
In short, when I pulled this week’s card, I didn’t want healing, I wanted to be healed.
It’s always fascinating to me what cards come up in response to questions, and even more so, what new perspectives those cards offer on those questions being asked. By definition, questions can’t help but be largely passive. I mean, that’s what questions are. We ask questions because we are unsure what to do next and need some guidance and instruction for going forward. We ask questions because we seek answers and wish to be told what to do. That’s natural. I don’t think there’s any shame or weakness in this. After all, if we didn’t seek outside ourselves, we would never learn new ways of being and would never grow and expand. Often, simply articulating and asking a question begins the process of finding an answer as our attention and intention are focused in a certain direction.
But this week it feels really important to remember that asking a question—no matter how well-crafted—is only ever the first step. Our answer—the Healing card—seems to be reminding us that although our questions may often be passive, what we do with the answers must be active. With Healing, we are not being handed a ready-made solution (we so rarely are!). Instead, we are being offered instructions for going forward.
We are being offered a talisman for doing.
This last weekend I had a book talk and mini workshop/card demonstration at The Spotty Dog in Hudson, NY for the release of my new deck Pleasure Alchemy. During the course of that talk, the word belonging came up. The word came up because it happens to be one of the remedy cards in the new deck—the 12th voice remedy, to be exact.
During that discussion I referenced how much I value and admire the fluid nature of “-ing” words, how they are active and ongoing. I have this whole philosophy that there are some words that do not belong in the past tense, some words that are meant to be ever-alive and ever-evolving. I think healing is one of those words—one of those realities.
That is the important thing here. Healing is a word, but as a verb, it’s also an action. Sometimes I get so caught up in my head and in parsing out meanings of abstract ideas and concepts that I forget the lived realities of words. That words are not only metaphors or internal landscapes. Words exist to articulate and explore life. And healing is such a vital, such a necessary part of living.
Our words shape reality, just as reality shapes and creates new words and new word relations. I don’t think thought and language can be separated. I think they are too closely linked. But it is fascinating to me how language (and therefore thought) can be separated from action. How sometimes, the greatest gulfs imaginable intervene between the words we speak and the actions we take.
So, how can we take action with the word healing this week? How can we remember to keep healing in the present tense and remember that healing is meant to be active? I know that for me, I deeply desire to be healed. To experience that sense of “-ed” completion. But a living world doesn’t really deal in “-ed”s, does it? A world where we stay in our bodies and seek to be present and grow and expand doesn’t flourish in the past tense. Instead, it lives in the present.
The present tense. The present tense.
Do you remember my post a few weeks back about the word tenderness? How it shares a word root with the word tension? I’m thinking of that now and wondering whether there’s some added wisdom to be gained right here. When thinking in any tense—and living in any tense—remember to be tender. And remember that the PIE1 root *ten means “to stretch.”
I can’t say what form your healing and my healing might take this week. But this card is a reminder to be active, and to keep “-inging” the hell out of your healing. Remember to find actions for your thoughts and your words. Express yourself. Explore what healing means to you at this point in your life and in these dark days of winter.
Lastly, I’ll leave you with a snippet from the Healing card’s message in the Resilience Alchemy guidebook:
Although you have experienced setback and sadness, grief and injury, healing has been your companion and your guide through it all. Things will not always be as they are. This is the gift of healing. Every experience will shift and move and change—just as it changes you.
Some ideas to engage with Healing this week:
Write a letter to your body thanking yourself for all the healing you’ve done throughout your life.
Think about your self-care routines. What do they contribute to the ongoing, active nature of healing in your life? Can you adjust or add more in?
If healing were a flower, what sort of flower could it be?
Create a three-sentence affirmation for healing. What are three aspects of healing that you believe are important?
PIE = It occurs to me that I haven’t explained what this means! PIE is the Proto-Indo-European language that is the common ancestor of the Indo-European family of languages. No direct records of PIE exist (that’s what the * signifies), but we can reconstruct meanings from the similar evolutions of words in different languages.