You Ascribe a Meaning Where There is No Meaning
Start digging for gold. You have just identified the beliefs and mindset that hinder flow in your life. In choosing this particular card you are being asked to question the meaning that you have given to a particular situation. Restructure your current mindset to open to another form of perception.
Your mind has placed meaning where there is no meaning. A situation, a fear that you have experienced, has become more profound with signs, symbols and warnings seen everywhere, all coming together now in a story that has meaning and a power within and over you.
This card indicates that you may routinely perceive your life in a way that reflects your insecurities back to you. You may take what is said to you too personally and confirm your fears that you are not respected, acknowledged, loved, and so on. Alternatively, you see overt signs, symbols, fears, which you ascribe to people or places. This tendency of mind can leave you feeling uncertain or disconnected from yourself and others.
In choosing this particular card you are being asked to question the mean-ing that you have given to a particular situation. You are also being asked to observe a universal truth: you create your reality. You currently see the world through a filter of how you understood and perceived your past experiences. This perception is automated and designed to filter out any experience that may be unsafe for you. This filter, however, has a side effect. With only one way of looking at the world it creates and modifies any new experiences to fit into the old mould of your past. Events occur a certain way because of how you perceive them and how you perceive them will determine how you therefore respond to them. A child who was bullied at primary school will several years after the event approach the playground more cautiously than the child who has never seen or experienced bullying. Unable to understand that the bullying was a childhood opportunity to develop and set boundaries, the child forms a belief that they are powerless and vulnerable – and this belief is carried into adulthood.
A belief is thought attached to emotion. Emotions power up or down the strength of any thought. Thoughts provide a structure for the way we live. They create our mindset. We use our emotions to defend our mindset comprising all the thoughts we believe are true. Our thoughts and emotions combine to help us create our sense of self. Each situation that you as a child misunderstood – like being bullied – now highlights a belief that needs up-dating because it’s no longer true for you as an adult. This updating (achieved by unlinking from or processing the emotions attached to the thought) is an opportunity to expand your mindset and its filter of perception. In this way you create your new reality.
Every time you judge a situation and perceive through the eyes of fear you disconnect from self, from love and from flow. For instance, let’s say you experience a situation in which someone lets you down. You had the expectation that your friend, lover, colleague would be there for you and then you find that they choose differently, possibly not perceiving your need. The tendency is to initially give the individuals and their actions a meaning depending on how you judge these things: they are mean spirited, thoughtless or selfish, etc. The real gold, however, is not the meaning you give others, it is the meaning you give yourself (mindset). Examining your mindset for the meaning you give will uncover the story you tell. Is it, ‘I am alone, unlovable?’, ‘Love passes me by?’ This back and forth questioning of the mind is the filter through which you perceive reality. This filter shapes the ways in which you fear missing out or feel that you cannot be loved. The experiences as seen through your distorted filter reflect parts of you that have yet to integrate into your core self, aspects such as your frailties, your judgements, your values, your fears. Removing the filter and re-examining this story is an opportunity to create new meaning – that you are loved, you are connected. When you are able to see your story through a different filter, a filter aligned with your core self, you might see that you don’t actually have rotten friends. You are learning to grow and are moving towards flow.
Start the journey back to yourself to enjoy flow. Look at everything around you from a fresh perspective. Discover the joy of seeing everything as if for the first time. Watch birds coast on wind currents, a child playing on the beach. Look at recent experiences from the other person’s point of view as if you didn’t exist. Look at all your frustrations with people and situations with a generosity of spirit in order to tell a completely new story. What happens when you change your viewpoint is that you become free to be yourself.
