Posts Tagged ‘Tarot’

Dreams, Oracles and Mandalas

May 27, 2014

Dearest blog readers,

A favorite client gently pointed out to me recently that I haven’t posted a blog since February. I winced. I think the last one I wrote was an announcement and description of the book that I am committed to writing this year. The challenges involved in finding time for that project have caused me to shy away from spending time with my blog, which for me involves a different style, intention and satisfaction as a writer. I intend to regain the rhythm of writing about more daily and current insights describing my depth psychological insights into life and dreams, as I value the regular articulation and interaction with readers.

Since many of my blog readers aren’t on my mailing list I’m going to insert here the newsletter I sent out today. It is a sort of post for this day, but more blogs will come soon.

Hello dear friends and colleagues,
 
Warm greetings to you. It has been awhile since I have written a newsletter.  After the sale of my Mountain Retreat Center a year and a half ago, the work of Bridging Worldshas been mostly private sessions with individuals. In my sweet office in downtown Asheville I offer sessions by telephone and in person for dream analysis as well asoracular consultations. Please take a moment to read the following short descriptions of the work. I composed them hoping to elucidate their profound value and to pique interest. Call me if you want to discuss or to make an appointment, and please pass along this information to others who may like to know.
 
I am also offering a six week course, along with Marie O. Davis, on Dreams and Mandala Making from June 15-July 20th in Asheville. See the description below for more information. Or use this link: http://www.tayriaward.com/home/events
 
I will be teaching a workshop on Reviving the Indigenous Mind at a Journey Conferences event in Stoneville, NC, October 30th to November 2nd. The main presenter at this conference will be Dr. Michael Conforti, Jungian Analyst and Director of the Assisi Institute. Dr. Conforti is a pioneer in the field of psyche-matter studies, and of investigating the relationship between the new sciences and Jungian psychology. Use this link for information about the conference:http://www.journeyconferences.com/conferenceinformation.htm
 
There was an op-ed piece in the New York Times recently about sleep and dreaming that I just loved. I wanted share the link with you. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/14/opinion/luhrmann-to-dream-in-different-cultures.html?ref=opinion
 
I send love and blessings to each of you and would love to hear from you to know how you are.
Sincerely,
Tayria
 
Why do Dreamwork, Consult the Oracle, or make alchemical mandalas? Read on.
 
Dreamwork:
Our dreams are nightly visions whose symbols offer the conscious mind necessary information coming to us from the vast terrain of the not-yet-conscious, or unconscious, realm whose wisdom is both personal and transpersonal. For millennia, in every culture and religion on every continent, in every scripture and mythology, messages in dreams are considered to have essential guidance for waking life. How modernity managed to step away from this resource and become dismissive of it is a study in itself. Recovering the forgotten language and potency of dreams has been a passion of mine during my entire adult life. My waking life has been actively informed and guided by dreams for 40 years.
 
I help persons to understand the valuable information in their dreams both in telephone sessions and face-to-face in my downtown Asheville, North Carolina, office. Some of the people I work with prefer a regular schedule for dreamwork to keep a steady connection with their dreaming psyche. Others call when a life event or a particular dream activates the desire to take a deeper look.
 
Oracular Consultations:
Oracles are messages that come to us from the matrix of love and intelligence that sees and knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. More than two decades ago a dream lead me into the study of oracles, and from that I experienced a sense of being consistently seen and cared for by an invisible “other” beyond anything I had ever imagined. It has assisted me since then in daily practical as well as mystical ways. The meanings have shown themselves to be reliable, non-judging, deeply compassionate, clear-seeing visions regarding what will be most helpful for me to know in the present moment.
 
I worked with oracles by myself for about 10 years—verifying, validating and calibrating their uses—before offering to use them to assist others. Over the last more than a decade of reading for others, for the most part using the symbols in the tarot, I am consistently grateful and amazed at the right-on-point clarity of what comes through. People leave the experience sometimes saying thing like they feel a foot taller, or like they are breathing rarefied air. The sense of realizing that we are utterly known and cared for is as useful as the specific information supplied.
 
Dreams and Mandala Making:
This endeavor has been created in collaboration with Marie O. Davis, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Asheville, NC, who has a graduate degree in Expressive Arts Therapy. Marie uses a method of alchemical mandala-making that is a collage process. Found images expressive of soul processes are placed in representative sections of the circle. Powerful transformative and healing energy is activated as the mandala is created. Using this technique in combination with the images presented in dreamwork with Tayria promises invaluable curative experience and revelation.
 
The next six-week series is offered on Sundays, June 15-July 20th in Asheville. For detailed information use this link: http://www.tayriaward.com/home/events, or call me to register.

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Ace of Frogs

October 8, 2011
Ace of Frogs

Ace of Frogs

I had another extraordinary dream a few nights ago. As if the Smiling Moon dream weren’t enough, here came another. I am receiving a tarot card reading in the dream. Four cards are shown, two in the major arcana that I don’t recall, the Ace of Swords (I am told exactly what this one points to for me now), the Ace of Frogs in the 4th card. I know in the dream that there is no such suit as the Suit of Frogs in the tarot deck as we know it, that this is somehow a whole new one. The Ace shows up for me in this reading.

I have studied the tarot for two decades, and use it regularly in reading for myself and for others. I find that tarot and dreams compliment each other exceptionally well. Twice over the last several years I have been shown a card in a dream that does not exist in the deck as we know it. As I awakened from each of these dreams, which were about 4 years apart, I was told to add that card to the deck. Everything is evolving, right? So I have added each of these cards to the deck that I use for readings.

I wasn’t given any message about adding to the deck in this dream, just received the Ace of Frogs. I don’t really have a clue what this means. Well, I do have some clues, but that’s all they are. I have written on my blog about the way Frog has shown up as an image in my life, but I will briefly summarize here again. I hope this is interesting for the reader as a means for musing upon the mystery of images, their potency, re-occurrence, and power to lead us along like bread crumbs through a dark forest. Here are a few of my bread crumbs:

  • While on a 10-day Vision Quest in 2000, living alone (from human company) under a tree, a little frog moved into my watering can. He perched with his front legs and snout hanging out of the spout. When I had to pour water, I poured him gently onto the ground, then used or gathered water from the stream. Shortly after I put the can down again I would find him right back in his perch. I loved the company – so sweet, steady, alert, soft, relaxed, present.
  • Sometime later I had a dream of finding my very favorite toy from childhood in my attic, a stuffed frog. I was very emotional about recovering it, so pleased. In real life there was no such toy.
  • The night before leaving for Italy for a writing retreat 3 summers ago, I was staying with a friend in Chicago. This is a waking story. She went to her front door and noticed a frog jumping down the sidewalk. It deliberately turned the corner onto the walk in front of her house, jumping right up to the front stoop. She picked it up, brought it inside and plopped it onto my lap as I sat on her couch, telling me it came to the door like a gentleman caller. She was being funny. She had no idea about any history of frogs showing up in my life.
  • Within the last year I had a dream in which I realized I had a new cell phone and should start using it. It had been a gift from the Dalai Lama. The phone was in the shape of a frog, with one leg toward the ear, another toward the mouth, a very nifty little design. It was covered with sparkling crystals in the colors of sea green and pink.
  • The photograph that I attach to this post was taken just off my porch in pitch black night a couple of months ago. I was outside looking at the stars and heard a sudden sound. Something living was right next to the porch. I was curious and went inside to find a flashlight. This is a picture of what I found. When I went back indoors to get the camera, the frog stayed right there, posing for the shot. It was still there when I went to bed sometime later. By morning it was gone.
What is the likelihood of such a string of remarkable events, so out of the blue? Something is full of meaning here, I do believe, but I don’t know what the meaning is.  Or whether I need to know, or even if it is knowable.
But now that I have received the Ace of Frogs in a dream, I think something is beginning. Aces point to beginnings. The mystery continues.

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Dreams and Tarot

October 5, 2010

Many years ago, once upon a time, I had a dream of a person I had never heard of named Angeles Arrien. I wrote her name in my dream journal and thought it must be a metaphor or story about angels. I kept playing with the words in my head. Then within a week I was in a bookstore and saw, to my amazement, a book called Tarot Handbook, by Angeles Arrien! I felt chills all through my body. I bought the book of course. She is a cultural anthropolgist, a brilliant teacher and author, and quite studied in Jungian thought. I had heard of tarot before, but that is the extent of it. I knew nothing about it, nor did I ever have any interest in it nor bias against it, or any other thought of it before this event. I started using Angeles’ book along with a tarot deck on a daily basis. At first I was fascinated, then helped, then healed, then it became my most powerful ally and blessed guide during shifting times of divorce and breakdown. I used it for nearly 10 years alone before I ever started reading for anyone else.

The first day of the first retreat I ever had at my new retreat center in February 2005 I was heading in toward the group to do morning dreamwork when a very insistent thought occurred. I didn’t even begin to question, even though it was brand new. I would bring the tarot deck out and have each person draw a card, and would use the messages from these along with the dreamwork.

With the success of that first experiment I never looked back. I have been using the two in combination regularly ever since. I had never heard of work done like this before, but it has been so powerful and inspirational, undeniably insightful and healing, precise, practical, intuitive, dead-on, prescient, and resonant with others that – even though an academic and conservative voice in myself and the world says not to speak of it too openly – I can’t not speak of the strength of the work. When I hesitated to use the word “tarot” in my new brochure, my daughter Arlene, who bravely came out as gay when she was only 17 years old in front of a whole high school not familiar with such announcements, said to me, “Mom. You’ve got to come out.” My hero had spoken.

Imagine my delight when I read these words last night in a book I am reading called Dreamways of the Iroquois, by Robert Moss: “Today, it is popular on the Iroquois reservation for people to supplement their dreams with readings of tarot cards, tea leaves, or shreds of native tobacco bobbing in a simmering saucepan.” (p.42) Wow, thank you! I feel affirmed and not so alone in the world! I also am interested in this statement, “The early Iroquois regarded someone who was not in touch with their dreams as the victim of serious soul-loss.” (p.38)

Native people on every continent have regarded dreams as messages from the divine, and honored them sacredly. Now reading that today certain of these native people are using some more modern and Western oracular methods along with the old ones, thrills and shivers my bones. Especially when we feel out there on the margins of everything, an affirmation from the wisdom of the past is grounding. Thank you.

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The Hermit

April 10, 2010

In the major arcana of a tarot deck, one of the cards represents the archetype of the Hermit. This symbol points to the need to go deep within to find answers rather than researching externally. The hermit holds the knowledge that cannot be found outside oneself, individual wisdom that is not dependent upon the opinions or ideas of others. As humans we naturally and wisely look to trusted friends or chosen advisors to provide thoughts, ideas and information in most aspects of our lives and decision-making. But there are times when the only real wisdom will come from the interior cave of the heart.

The Hermit archetype presented itself to me several times today in a lively way. I feel it pushing me to my inner source. I love gathering points of view of people I respect when considering life issues; it is fascinating and so helpful. Ultimately however, the way-shower is showing me the way inside. As much as we often wish they could, no one outside of ourself can point out the steps that will lead us to our particular destination. The journey is always a singular one, and the archetype of the Hermit reminds us of this. His lantern guides each one to the truth that lies within.

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