Reality check

Heart of Faeries, Froud 2010 

It's great to be a 'Soul Survivor' like yesterday's card, but you can't always go roaring through your life that you 'might have been QUEEN!' Sometimes survival is about knowing when to keep quiet and listen. Nobody understands that better than the animals featured on this card from Brian Froud's Heart of Faeries Oracle. In the background, I see what looks like a horse's eye, and a hare with long ears, and at the top, I see antlers. These are all prey animals, and I assume the big-eyed faerie gazing at us from the card represent them and their qualities. They must be intensely alert at all times, aware of their surroundings from all sides, ready to take action for self-preservation. This, too, is an important part of being a soul survivor. You have to know when to prick up your ears.

Today is a day to be still and listen. To be closely attuned to every sensory perception in your present moment. Present moment living can take you out of anxiety. Here's an exercise I just learned. Whenever you catch yourself caught up in an anxious thought, do NOT start to argue with it, telling yourself to stop thinking about it. Instead, say, 'Here is my anxiety,' and then STAND UP, take a step to one side, drop your shoulders, loosen your jaws and relax your hands, pat yourself on the legs or bum, and then take in your surroundings using your five senses - what do you hear happening around you? What do you see? What do you smell? What can you feel? What can you taste? Breathe normally. You are in the moment. You have pricked up your ears.

I guarantee you that when a rabbit suddenly feels anxious, she doesn't begin to play a tape in her head that says, 'Oh, stop being so ridiculous, you shouldn't worry so much, you are just making yourself sick,' or 'Why do I always do this, why can't I control my thoughts,' or 'Oh I knew this would happen if only I hadn't come on this path,' or even 'Oh no! I'm going to die! I'm going to die!' NO WAY does she do this -- she pricks up her ears, she puts her full attention on the sensory perception of the present moment -- she gives herself a sensory REALITY CHECK. She doesn't just keep moving along nibbling at grass and trying to ignore her feelings.

The card tells me to do three things today:

1. Don't talk too much today. Instead, listen to others.
2. Pay more attention to what is unsaid than to what is said.
3. Don't listen to internal tapes today. Take physical action to break that cycle - stand up and move to the side and ground in the present moment.

Maybe you needed that advice today, too.