Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess Deck App

The Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess App available at Consciousness Apps and Apple iTunes store.

The Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess is now available as a handy iPhone/iPod Application ($3.99). It is published and available for sale at ConsciousnessApps.com or the Apple iPhone App Store (in the lifestyle category).

This beautiful app for the iPhone and iPod features the 22 cards of the Major Arcana and easy to use scrolling chapters with additional explanations for each of the cards. Now you can take these Wisdom Cards anywhere you go and refer to them when you have the time to contemplate their spiritual teachings in more depth. Great on its own or as an elegant addition when you are traveling if you are using the deck set at home.

- Galaxy background with star animation offers 3-dimensional perspective as cards zoom in and out through space.
- Read more about each Affirmation Tarot Card by tapping once on the image: card flips over and reveals in-depth explanations, affirmations and exercises.
- Swipe left and right to see other cards in sequence.
- Turn your iPhone/iPod Touch horizontally to view all the cards at once.

Contemplating the Universe - Video Interview with Leslie Zehr

Now on YouTube: more about my Goddess Deck, my interview with Leslie Zehr: "Contemplating the Universe".

The Healing Path of the Wounded Healer

The "Wounded Healer" archetype is a special kind of healer; not a regular healer.

By Skye Avalon

What is a Wounded Healer?

If you are someone who is sensitive or very intuitive (clairaudient, clairessant or clairvoyant)*, from a family history of emotional or physical abuse, find yourself in the middle of solving family quarrels, and suffer from first chakra illnesses like joint, bone, autoimmune, skin or blood disease, you may be a wounded healer.

*Clairessant: The ability to gain extra-sensory information through feeling. Clairaudent: The ability to hear sound and voices that are outside of the natural range of hearing. Clairvoyant: The ability to gain extra-sensory information through pictures.

In home environments where chaos is the norm, wounded healers are the psychic gatekeepers of the family. They are intuitive or very sensitive to things beyond the range of normal perception either as a result of being born this way or as an acquired survival skill. Often considered by others to be different, scapegoats or the black sheep of the family, they are the intuitive conduits that keep a dysfunctional family together in an unconscious effort to meet their own survival needs. Their family of origin is the primary place where wounded healers learn how to communicate and trust other people and the first environment that teaches how safe the world is. Wounded healers raised in functional households may have survived horrible traumas such as war, rape or torture.

When a wounded healer survives their challenging past history they have an ability to thrive as a result of gaining greater awareness, understanding and empathy for the human condition as a result of their past trauma.

The Differences Between the Wounded Healer Archetype and the Healer Archetype

Why is a wounded healer different then a healer who may have also suffered from challenging past histories?

What distinguishes wounded healers from healers is their extra sensitive or intuitive psyches (highly developed right brain capabilities), experiences of intense and often long-term suffering in dysfunctional families, and a Dark Night of the Soul – which is the psychic equivalent of a near death experience.

Wounded healers who survive their challenging ordeals and the Dark Nightcan acquire healing skills for repairing the human spirit. Their special skills are a result of developing their intuition for survival – a skill that cannot be easily taught in a classroom. A wounded healer may or may not have training in mind or body healing but if they do, they can expand and illuminate their healing skills in both western healing modalities and alternative medicine. Wounded healers can also guide others and show them the way back from emotional underworlds of depression, dark thoughts and hopeless despair.

Healers serve others by repairing mind, body or spirit. They are gifted in their ability to help people transform physical or emotional pain into a healing process. Most western healers specialize in a specific healing modality although it is becoming more common to find healers trained in both western and alternative style healing modalities that help patients integrate and then apply a body-mind-spirit approach to health.

The Psyche’s Mortal Wound

Wounded healers often experience deep emotional and mental wounds in their early formative years of childhood and adolescence or through some kind of horrible trauma. This psyche wound can be mortal if it is not eventually healed and result in an early death. Sometimes the psyche’s wound manifests itself into a physical illness or injury where emotional and mental well-being is so deeply conflicted and unstable that a person’s thought patterns result in self-destructive behavior.

One of the unique characteristics of the psyche’s mortal wound is it can only be healed after the symbolic death of the egoic self. Another characteristic of this mortal wound is the wounded healer at some time realizes she has a conscious choice to heal the wound at any time in order to live. Even during what can become a long, slow decent into emotional underworlds of dark thoughts, depression and hopeless despair.

Soul Retrieval – Calling the Spirit Back and Discovering the Authentic Self

The most self-destructive and critical period in the life of a wounded healer is often referred to as the “Dark Night of the Soul”. Or it is referred to as “hitting bottom” by 12 step recovery programs. This period can last days, months or many years.

It is during the Dark Night that the wounded healer has reached a crisis of faith in themselves and others. This is when fragile belief structures collapse resulting in great internal conflict and confusion. This critical period is when every decision can result in tragic consequences. It is often during these times of deep suffering when relatives and friends of wounded healers feel helpless to stop the downward spiral of self-destruction and they constantly worry about their loved ones well being.

Some Shamans referred to people with mortal psychic wounds as lost souls. They understood that the human spirit was immortal and the only way to bring back the loss of vital power was to have lost souls send out their own guardian spirit or power animal to retrieve the lost soul. Navajo tribal elders knew that to bring the living dead back to life was to ritualize the process of having them call their spirit back into their body.

Western trained healers would understand the psyche’s mortal wound as an emotional and mental violation beyond what the human mind can cognitively comprehend. They would describe the symptoms as some kind of mental or psychological illness or disease. To treat the symptoms, they often prescribe antidepressants that can sometimes prolong the suffering and increase drug tolerance for even more mental and physical complications. The western healing approach may have good intentions but it often misses the third and most important component of a mind-body-spirit solution – spirit.

What western healers can realize is that successful treatment results in a psychic death not a physical death and what may be needed is a more integral approach of both western and alternative healing modalities that include mind, body and spirit. This is why 12 step recovery programs are often successful when other western healing solutions have failed.

The only way for wounded healers to become well is to retrieve the fragmented pieces of their mind, body and spirit. Of course, we never really loose our spirit or souls but to “call our spirits back” is an important and symbolic way to describe returning from the Dark Night – the emotional underworlds of lost souls and the living dead.

The Ultimate Solution – Ego Death

Paradoxically the Dark Night is also a time of tremendous grace since deep suffering offers the wounded healer the opportunity to realize at any moment they don’t have control of everything in their lives. To heal, the wounded healer has to stop “playing God” and turn their life over to the care of a higher authority.

By choosing to surrender the egoic self to a higher authority in the name of the Divine, by ritualistically “retrieving the soul” or “calling one’s spirit back” a symbolic ego death can occur and physical death of the body is avoided.

The reason psychic death can feel like a real death is because of the amount of terror involved in not knowing what will happen after a wounded healer stops trying to control everything. Unfortunately, wounded healers often unconsciously or consciously choose to end their lives because dieing often means to stop the pain and suffering.

The Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous is the opening prayer at recovery group meetings and is a very helpful tool for wounded healers to use in letting go and beginning the healing process.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I can not change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen”.

Also helpful are the first, second and third steps in a 12-step recovery program which are:

1. We admitted we were powerless over (fill in the blank) and that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater then ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.

However the wounded healer eventually finds a higher authority (God, Divine, Allah, Goddess, Shiva, Creator, Govinda, etc.), it is through surrendering control – a symbolic death of the ego – and finding a new faith in self, others and God, that is the most immediate and penetrating healing solution for curing the suffering of wounded healers.

Rebirth of the Authentic Self

It takes great courage and internal strength for the wounded healer to retrace her challenging past history in order to alchemically transform it into a wellspring of self-knowledge, faith and wisdom. Like a salve that heals a wound but leaves a scar, wounded healer’s scar tissue is their past personal story that can be retold to inspire and heal others. This past personal story gives the wounded healer their unique healing skills to empathically understand and feel the fear, pain and suffering of others. Through their sharing of traumatic life experiences, they can help others transform their pain and suffering into faith of self, others and God. Love and faith in God can completely and miraculously heal the wounded self in one moment. So, without scar tissue, the wounded healer would be another kind of healer perhaps.

The Abundance and Joy of Life After the Dark Night of the Soul – Wisdom Through Experiential Knowledge

Like the Goddess Inanna, wounded healers internally strong enough to return from the Dark Night, bring back knowledge and wisdom about their own vulnerability and the necessity of sacrifice. They learn how the cycles of life are a thread of commonality for us all. Through the emotional dark underworlds their heart opens in compassion for all beings.

After the Dark Night of the Soul the past becomes a part of their bigger story about the eternal purpose of the soul. The past is understood as an essential component of bringing about universal lessons that grow consciousness and wisdom through surviving difficult situations, internal confusion and pain. The scar from the wound becomes a source of inspiration and empowerment. A new purpose is realized as wounded healers awaken to Divine Grace and the radiant wonder of the universe.

The Gift of Service

Wounded healers are often working in service to others through their careers. Because they have experienced a death of their psyches, wounded healers have the unique ability to fearlessly channel spiritual wisdom, combined with their own humanity and unfolding life story and through their passionate personal stories. They have the ability to go beyond mind and perceive life as a gift of evolutionary growth. They also gain the discernment and wisdom to choose a conscious life of power and purpose. Wounded healers empowered by their own healing path are mystics who have traveled the emotional dark underworlds of human misery and survived to tell others what a beautiful blessing life is.

About Author and Goddess Artist Skye Avalon
Skye Avalon has been working as a fine artist, commercial illustrator and graphic web designer for over 20 years and specializes in creative work that leads to greater understanding and awareness. Her goddess art incorporates her interest in the study of transpersonal psychology, integral transformative spiritual practice and the evolution of human consciousness. She cares deeply about both men and women and also about the ecological preservation of the planet, which benefits all living things. To order a copy of Pamela’s most recent book and card set, Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess, www.ArtmagicPublishing.com

Blessings on You O Children of Ancient Days

May you grow strong and tall and full of grace.

May you run straight and true and keep your pace.

May God’s light shine for you your way ahead

and darkness and peril ne’er draw near to you.

O children, dear to my heart,

may you know joy in all your doings

and such success, strength and true happiness

that all who know you may count you truly blessed.

O sweet spirits,

knoooow love,

beeee loved.

And listen–softly now–to that sweet, siren song of your soul

that you may see all that is true

praying across the deep to you.

-Melissa Osborne (aka Lyrica)

Poetry by Melissa Osborne is a writer and the creator of Lyricalworks founded in 1995. Melissa can be reached at lyrica@lyricalworks.com or see more of her poetry at her website Lyricalworks.com.

Artwork by Lori Felix brings to life the goddess in the form of beautiful and symbolic figurative paintings. Originally from New York but now living in a tiny town in Mississippi, Lori’s goddesses capture the dreamy world of bayous, rivers and waterways that are a regular part of the Mississippi landscape. More of Lori’s work can be seen at her website http://www.LorFelix.com. Please contact Lori if you would like to learn more about her or ask permission to use her artwork.

How to Become a Whole Human Being – Reconnecting to Your Primal Nature

Finding a Pathway Back to Your Divine Feminine Essence

by Skye Avalon

We have been denied a positive relationship with our own feminine core that has guided us intuitively since the beginning of human evolution. Our primal nature is written in the code of our DNA and hard wired in our brains. We can’t help but want to be connected to the pulsating magnetic force field of the earth at the root of our being.

Our primal nature is the feminine aspect of every human being. It is life force energy and our original nature. From an archetypal perspective she is referred to as Great Mother, Gaia, the Divine, Goddess, Love (Eros) or Passion. 

When our primal nature is split off into our psyches it eventually becomes a destructive force within us and in the world. The earth’s future and our shared destiny is now a human predicament so what we do individually has enormous consequences. We must strive to become reconnected to the whole so we can begin living in harmony with each other and the earth’s ecosystems.

“Any hope of peace requires us to endeavor to maintain an open heart while having the courage to dance in the mystery of who we are.”

Why We Deny the Feminine
We all suffer in cultures that shame and disconnect us from our primal nature. Neither patriarchy nor feminism is large enough to define a whole human being.

Patriarchy willingly sacrifices the feminine at the alter of our egos. We want everything but don’t want to pay a price for what we desire. This irresponsible sense of entitlement results from an unholy marriage in our psyches between the dominating father (patriarch or negative masculine) and devouring mother (mother complex or negative feminine). Carl Jung would describe these aspects as our shadow. 

Patriarchal cultures are created and then prolonged from fear of death and the unknown. They abhor primal, life force energy and try to explain, control and sanitize everything. As a result, the feminine is split off in the human psyche and her negative aspects are concretized into a mother complex who is devouring, emotionally troubled, petty and vindictive. Because patriarchy limits our ability to relate to the nourishing aspects of our primal nature, the feminine is then perceived as frightening, irrational and chaotic rather then creative, abundant and life sustaining. 

The counter-cultural feminist movement has given women more economic opportunities to integrate their masculine aspects and increased societal awareness and appreciation of women’s unique reproductive and sexual roles. What it has not addressed is the the patriarch within women and the mother complex within women and men. So despite amazing accomplishments to empower and obtain more rights for women, feminism has not disrupted patriarchy. If we continue to blame patriarchy and men for the world’s problems and portray women as victims we further polarize women and men. What we need are much more expansive definitions of who we are.

“Splitting off the feminine “Soul of God” makes us forget how connected we really are to each other and the Divine.” 

The Creative Power of the Feminine (anima) in Union with the Positive Masculine (animus)
If women and men are ever to form bonds that are peaceful and equal we must integrate the feminine and positive masculine within ourselves. Carl Jung called these aspects in our psyches anima and animus. It is a man’s acknowledgment of his anima that give him the ability to be consciously engaged, passionate and connected to a noble cause and a woman’s animus that assist her in fulfilling her life’s purpose. When both of these positive archetypes are integrated in our psyches (masculine/feminine – left brain/right brain – mind/heart) we have infinite potential to expand our intelligence, creative power and the limits of who we are. 

The animus is the beloved masculine within us all who loves and protects women, children and the earth. He seeks freedom and gives women and men the ability to make distinctions and take action in a positive and purposeful way, such as advancing talents and skills and developing self-esteem.

The anima represents matter, energy and invisible quantum forces. She is mysterious, intuitive, non-linear and chaotic. She is the Great Mother of life and death and the relational matrix where familial and ancestral patterns were established deep in our past. Engaging the feminine aspects means becoming vulnerable to sorrow and grief as another part of being fully human while connecting and paying attention to nature, our bodies and our hearts – the symbolic center of our original, intuitive intelligence.

How We Can Become Whole – Reconnecting to Who We Really Are
We will not realize our fullest potential without encountering the feminine and masculine shadow within ourselves. 

Women must choose to move beyond limited sexual and reproductive roles: the maiden, mother and crone and reevaluate the negative masculine roles they adopted in patriarchy. Women who are victims (passive and entrapped) won’t have enough ego strength or self-esteem to contain the consuming, petty and predatory greed of their feminine shadow. A woman who has moved beyond victimhood, taken full responsibility for her own evolution and developed her positive masculine aspects has the ability to face her mother complex and birth her creative ideas into the world. 

Men must look deeply into their own feelings and reject the armor of machismo and other defenses. A man must struggle with his own destructive mother complex and stop projecting mother on women before he will be able to access his emotional and relational depths. Once a man is able to compassionately connect and dialogue with his own heart, he will be able to honor and acknowledge the awesome power and intuitive intelligence of the Great Mother. 

Why Our Primal Nature (the Feminine) is So Frightening
The price we pay for our unconscious entitlement and failure to integrate the feminine and positive masculine within ourselves is ecological destruction, sexual objectification, war, violence, victim hood, bad relationships and irrational fears of others who are not like us. With no initiatory experience to remember our feminine essence in our bodies or in nature we fear using our intuitive intelligence, experiencing the natural cycles of life and death, and realizing we are part of the evolving, unfolding mystery.

The Feminine is Life and Death
We don’t want to acknowledge the natural cycles of life and death. Despite our collective efforts to deny death by intellectualizing God and our own immortality we fear death and our own sexuality. We instinctively know the destructive and life giving power of our own nature. 

The Feminine is Awesome and Mysterious
We don’t trust what we can’t see or explain. We want to believe that we can somehow measure and control everything so we won’t feel vulnerable and helpless. Every time we look at the cosmos we are reminded of the awesome mystery of our own existence and how insignificant we are.

The Feminine is Chaotic and Irrational
We don’t have faith in nonlinear, intuitive and emotional intelligence. We fear what we can’t logically understand or explain with our minds. 

The Feminine Must be Honored and Acknowledged
By being part of cultures that deny our own mortality and give us a sense of entitlement to Her abundance, we pay the price in psychic pain and suffering from the loss of resources, species extinction and human life. 

“Remembering the Soul of God (our primal nature) requires participation in death for only in death can someone truly be Awake.” 

How We Can Reconnect to Our Primal Nature
If we were wiser, we would gladly pay the price for the gift of our life through deep gratitude and reverence. We would acknowledge our connection and rightful place within the matrix of life and consciously engage with Her through a vulnerable heart, love and tears. The most powerful first step we can take to honor Her, is face our fear of death. 

Feel the Fullness of Life by Embracing Death
· Hold an evolutionary perspective
· Relinquish sexual power over others for the relational power of companions and friends
· Realize unity and equality with both women and men by dialoguing about how we are biologically different and how we are alike then celebrating our uniqueness
· Consciously mourn and grieve through the shared pain, suffering and loss
· Remember the Truth “All is One” – we are never separate from Source
· Surrender the ego and learn to be guided by a higher power through your intuition or inner voice

Surrender to the Mystery of Not Knowing
· Act with integrity by bringing together heart (soul) and mind (spirit)
· Become humble, lead with humility and always remain curious
· Dwell in the world of imagination and dialogue with mystery through art, dreams, stories, songs, dance and writing

Develop the Strength to Live in Paradox and Chaos  
· Trust in life by developing faith and a spiritual practice
· Step into the chaos and ride it into the storm – surrender to what is
· Learn to be emotionally rational by joining together intellectual and intuitive intelligence 

Honor and Acknowledge the Feminine and Take Full Responsibility for Your Life
· Take responsibility for your own evolution
· Reject being a victim
· Become autonomous
· Cultivate courage
· Create initiation rites so you can mature
· Fully embrace what is by being vulnerable – Feel the Truth “All is Love”
· Thank Her for all that She has given. Know that we are surrounded by Grace at all times and our life is to be loved. 

When we develop a relationship with our primal nature we become empowered and actively engaged in life. She reconnects us to our soul, emotional life, our body, other people and living beings. She protects, cherishes and nurtures us. 

We do have a choice to be here on earth as a channel of love and grace. In order to do so, we must surrender to her awesome beauty and power and then with love and hope take responsibility for our destiny as well as the shared destiny of all beings and our precious planet.

How to Practice Tapping Your Primal Energies to Unleash Your Creative Potential

Cosmic space - the womb of the divine feminine.

Your Primal Essence – the Divine Feminine

by Skye Avalon

Do you feel uninspired or even burned out in your life? 

While you may want to be more creative, you may be blocked from expressing your creative impulses. 

In our fast moving, technologically driven society, it is easy to be removed from our creative source. While technology was supposed to free us from mundane tasks and enable us to have more time and energy, but it seems to be sucking us into a vortex of never-ending distractions and division of our attention away from our source of creative energies and vitality. 

We are free at any time to pause and recognize when we are uninspired and blocked from the flow of life force energy always available to us. This primal force is nature’s raw untapped energy. It contains every possibility of the One that is within all of us. 

By regularly practicing tapping your own primal nature, you have the opportunity to recreate yourself again and again. This practice begins by releasing those resistances inside you that prevent you from accessing these energies. During the course of our daily lives and with the pressures and demands of personal and business responsibilities, we get caught up in all of these doings and forget about these essential energies in our being. Thus, when you begin to consciously let go of your need to control all the elements of your life, you will begin to step into the natural flow of life.

Every aspect of who you are contains these primal energies. However, there are certain areas in your being where such energies are blocked from flowing. A great way of releasing stuck energy is to sit down in a comfortable seat and allow yourself to settle your pelvis. It is very common to experience a pooling of blocked energy in the core of the pelvis, which results from distractions, demands, and the fast pace of a modern technological society. Indeed, when you are angry, fearful, anxious, or experiencing any other contractive emotions, you tend to have a commensurate lift in your whole pelvic floor. These rising energies in the pelvis leave you feeling unstable, insecure, and unsteady. Therefore, to bring balance, you can choose to align with these primal energies in your self and particularly in the pelvis, which are associated with feelings of security, safety, and stability. When you allow your pelvis to literally settle into the seat of where you sit, you contact something bigger than yourself. By re-anchoring yourself, you return to the source of your primal energies and you sit in your own nature. 

When you have literally allowed yourself to settle into your deepest self, you access all of your potential. These primal energies are just that – raw energy that is vital and untapped. They have immense power. 

Set a high intention for yourself that will invoke your potency. The higher the vision, the more that you access these vital energies. Often, when you limit what you desire to small, narrow and short- term goals, you restrict what you can harness inside. However, as you begin to realize that you can be a great offering to another person, cause, or something other than just yourself, these more potent primal energies become revealed. 

As you invoke these primal energies through intention, then, it is the very process of shaping them, cultivating them, and then offering them to the world that becomes the creative act that we all inherently seek. By mining the depths of who we are, we have the opportunity to fashion the “core” that we find into jewelry – into something valuable. It is this continual practice of taking what is natural inside and then refining it such that it can be expressed and offered outside as something of value. This becomes the process of aligning who we are inside (nature) and how we act and offer outside (culture). This ultimately leads us to remember the source of ourselves and everything around us. 

Instead of seeing ourselves and others as separate, as we connect with our primal nature and create from that deep place, we begin to see more clearly how One energy is expressing itself in infinite forms. 

May you remember to pause, breathe, settle, and go to the depths of who you are.

The Mystery of the Moon – Nonlinear Mastery of Breath

By conscious breathing, you begin to synchronize all parts of your mind: the rational and analytical mind with the more intuitive and feeling mind.

By Skye Avalon

The moon gives us the opportunity to reflect upon and bring a new awareness to our doing.

Our lives are busy and full of multitasking. We are rewarded in our Western culture for our achievements in the most efficient way possible. This forces a more linear and analytical approach to life. We can easily approach life only trying to be as productive as possible. So much emphasis on a life of doing squeezes out our deeper impulse to be creative and to add meaning to expressions of who we are.

The first step is to pause in all the doing, to take a deep breath and to smile. Let your breath be soft, clear and luminous – like moonlight. Allow any resistances to your creative self fade. This simple act of connecting with your breath helps you to realize that you’re the essential source and wellspring of creativity that is already deeply present. By conscious breathing, you begin to synchronize all parts of your mind: the rational and analytical mind with the more intuitive and feeling mind. Thoughts can begin to move beyond the linear to a more curvy and wavelike pattern. Optimally, when you really permit yourself to make a deep connection inside, you connect to a higher intelligence and then a bigger picture emerges. This opening takes you into the very depth of pulsation from which all of your thoughts and feelings come.

Feel yourself drop into this deep level of pulsation in your breathing. It is the pulsation of all living beings at the highest level and at the most microcosmic level. This pulsation takes you into your heart and balances the life of doing with a higher energy. Begin to align yourself with this pulsation. Feel the waves of this pulsation in the form of your breath. If you focus on the tip of your nostrils, you can sense the cool air entering on the inhalation and the warm air exiting on the exhalation. Continue this focus and this can take you deeper into a deeper alignment with the pulsation of life.

As you become more comfortable in the center of the pulsation, allow creative thoughts to emerge from these depths. This is the source of the deeper and “inner” wisdom. No longer bobbing on the surface, you are in the currents of pulsation. It is here that a deeper awareness can take place. It is at this level of being from which a shift to wholeness is re-inspired.

Take this higher perspective into your actions and expressions to enhance your life. Even if life is busy, there is always time to pause, to take a breath and to shift your awareness. These little moments of awareness throughout the day create openings of insight and allow for ease and flow.

Healing with Love

By Skye Avalon

Our view of ourselves and of the world around us can either hinder or facilitate healing. 

When you are faced with some kind of challenge in your life, whatever it is, what is your default way of viewing it? Do you quickly respond in fear, anger or sadness? Is there an internal struggle that feels like you are being squeezed and it is difficult to breathe? All of these reactions to challenges perpetuate a cycle that conditions you to a world of stress. You become accustomed to viewing the world as a place of constant tension from multiple sources. This viewpoint is especially emphasized if you are constantly ruminating about all of the problems in your life and how other people or events are the root of the problem. You will find that when you are in your mind you tend to see others as separate. This division becomes internalized and there is a split between your heart (feminine aspect of yourself) and your mind (masculine aspect of yourself). Your mind will continue to see separtation while your heart yearns for connection. 

A different perspective can offer a way to respond to life’s challenges that bring greater ease and ultimately an optimal way of engaging in the world.

Whenever you are faced with a challenge, just pause and reflect on what blessings you have in your life. Be in your heart and it will automatically pull all of your systems into alignment like a strong magnet. What results is that all of you becomes revitalized, your immune system is boosted, and your physical heart is strengthened. You literally begin to increase you electro-magnetic field. 

When you allow yourself to live again in your heart, you naturally see the world from a more expansive perspective. This invites you to engage the world by participating with this unconditional energy that is your deepest self in ways that then allow greater ease. By viewing the world in this way, instead of seeing the world and others as a problem, you awaken to the understanding that everything around you is this One energy expressing itself in infinite ways. 

When you take such a broad vision, then every challenge becomes an opportunity for you to align the ways that you engage yourself with others and the world so that how you act reflects what you deeply value. 

When you act in accordance with your deepest beliefs and from a view of the world in the highest, then you are whole. There is no conflict between your mind and heart. This is the foundation for radiant health. 

May you continue to choose a life inspired by love rather than driven by fear. May you seek ways to uncover that which blocks and covers a love so deep that it will continue to support you no matter what you may have done in the past. It is a love that keeps on giving. 

May you open yourself up to receive that love. 

Your are worthy.

The Journey to Greater Knowledge, Understanding and Awareness – Checklist for Seekers

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” –Teilhard de Chardin

By Skye Avalon

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
–Teilhard de Chardin

The “Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess” deck suggests a general time line for the stages of human psychological growth beginning at the 0 Fool card and ending at the 21 World card. The journey to higher states of awareness and the psychological stages of growth is a never-ending process of self-discovery. Below is a personal growth “Checklist for Seekers”. 

The purpose of your life journey is to attain clarity, wisdom and understanding in order to live a joyful life. You can become a joyful person by realizing everyday life is your path to knowing yourself and the Divine. The 17 Star card to the 21 World card are the ultimate goals of psychological growth: wisdom, discernment, freedom and knowing God (Absolute Pure Consciousness). 

These cards say that when you live your life with more awareness, everything you do is an opportunity for creative acts or good works in service to others, the world and the heavens. You then become an agent of the world’s evolutionary impulse by filling yourself up with Spirit’s divine, luminous energy in order to joyfully transform yourself and others.

Throughout your life journey, there will be many challenges. It is often through adversity that you can make the greatest progress. What may seem like very difficult situations to you – 13 Death, 15 Devil or 16 Tower – can result in immeasurable wisdom and good fortune (10 Wheel of Fortune – 16 Tower) once you understand the key teachings of these affirmations. When life is difficult, often it helps to remember that the meaning of your birth was for you to create a wonderful life knowing God. 

Somewhere along the journey, you may have a direct, personal experience with God (5 High Priest). This experience is a gift and should not be ignored because it is the beginning of the more meaningful aspects of self-knowledge (7 Chariot – 16 Tower).

CHECKLIST FOR SEEKERS – The Journey to Self-Knowledge Encompasses:
-Having a passion to know the answer to life’s most challenging questions and starting the journey
-Liberating yourself from disempowering and limiting beliefs
-A willingness to be ridiculed in order to try on new perceptions
-Observing, studying and becoming more connected with your thoughts and the invisible world
-Recognizing and honoring your connection to the whole cosmos
-Loving yourself enough to be of value to all other beings
-Nourishing your body, mind and spirit while celebrating your own life and the lives of all other beings
-Embodying and expressing joy and love through your body, mind and spirit
-Tirelessly protecting and unconditionally loving all beings
-Integrating many perceptions and beliefs
-Expanding your horizons and awareness by having an open mind
-Developing inner awareness and becoming integrated (internally and externally consistent)
-Moving past your personality and embracing your authentic self
-Studying the sacred texts of your culture, including them and moving beyond them
-Seeking knowledge and truth in order to understand God
-Believing in something greater than yourself
-Creating a sacred space and practicing inner silence
-Exploring unexplainable events with curiosity
-Loving yourself
-Loving another human being unconditionally
-Growing in love to include all of existence
-Surrendering to God
-Forgiving and letting go of the past
-Rewriting your personal history
-Re-creating a timeless, limitless, abundant you
-Integrating and aligning your personal power and your power of choice with the will of God
-Connecting to your dreams and passions and then using this life force energy to serve the higher good
-Discovering your own truths and then being true to yourself
-Taking responsibility for your choices and their consequences
-Suspending judgment while discerning natural hierarchies of truth
-Taking responsibility for manifesting your own personal destiny
-Embracing spiritual spontaneity (the play of consciousness)
-Being truthful to yourself and others
-Seeing through the illusion of events to uncover their ultimate meaning
-Enduring personal sacrifice for spiritual growth
-Releasing your ego’s identification with the material world (matter) and the mind
-Learning spiritual truths and experiencing God through your body and the physical world
-Being able to stand for your own truth
-Finding the eternal in the changing
-Practicing symbolic sight and embracing spiritual truth
-Integrating the duality of opposites
-Paying attention to your inner guidance, whether through visions, inspiration or intuition
-Bringing the “light of conscious awareness” to the hidden, hated parts of your self
-Healing the split between your inauthentic and authentic self
-Enduring the “dark night of the soul”
-Establishing a contemplative practice to remind you that you are loved and never alone
-Removing the irrelevant and unimportant
-Learning how to correctly translate God’s guidance
-Joining ordinary time with the spiritual perception of eternity
-Gaining wisdom through experience
-Turning adversity into blessings
-Awakening to your own responsibility for the empowerment of all of humankind
-The power to remember the past, present and future
-Surrendering illusions in order to receive divine truth
-Being love and energy to co-create the world you desire

Valentine’s Day Blessings for the Goddess

Expand your awareness to reveal the gift of yourself in the form of your own natural breath. At its essence, this presence is the very ground of being – pure love.

By Skye Avalon

We are never ultimately alone. We are always in relationship, whether we know it or not. If you take the time to pause and just listen, you can begin to open yourself to the presence that is always fully present – hidden in plain sight. Wherever you are, allow yourself to soften and reveal a presence that is bigger than yourself and always inclusive of all aspects of you – body, feelings, and thoughts. Expand your awareness to reveal the gift of yourself in the form of your own natural breath. At its essence, this presence is the very ground of being – pure love.

Something as simple and familiar as your breath holds the secret, this ever present energy that contains all of the keys to your deepest fulfillment. As you surrender to your own breath and accommodate its pulsation, notice that you are actually being breathed. A deeper intelligence operates behind the scenes and runs all of the sophisticated systems that allow you to simply be. How wonderful is that? Without any effort on your part you can enjoy the gift of your body, mind, and heart.

As you reveal your breath and the gift of yourself from this radiant presence of something greater, let the awareness spread to every part of you. Let every aspect of you be lit up so that no part is left feeling separate. This is your opportunity to bring the light of awareness to all of the seeming diversity of your complicated self – so that you simply affirm that all of you is actually united in LOVE. Let even your doubts and uncertainties be included in this embrace by LOVE. Allow yourself to be vulnerable so that even those parts that seem shadowy or cry out are not neglected and are affirmed.

This reflection can be further enhanced by refreshing your memory of a person in your life that has really inspired the best in you. Visualize that person and draw the energy of that person deep into your consciousness. Recall what quality of heart he or she has invoked that you truly admire. Perhaps that person represents courage, compassion, patience, steadfastness, enthusiasm, or some other great virtue.

As you continue to focus on that person, allow that virtue he or she represents to be infused into your breath. Let your breath carry and inspire that quality of being into all of you so that the highest virtue unites all of you. You carry the light of your awareness through your breath by such a wonderful quality of heart. With a consciously cultivated heart, now open your eyes and maintain what you have created. Look out into the world with the vision of what you have revealed inside. Let your inner vision inform how you see the world. You are empowered to see all of the forms of the world in its ever changing and diverse nature from a united perspective.

Empower Yourself and Increase Your Connection With the Divine

The more you empower yourself with self-knowledge, the more you engage in intuitive learning, the more you will increase your connection to the Divine.

By Skye Avalon

If what you were taught to believe doesn’t support you being an empowered and active participant in your life, it may be a good time for you to open your mind to a bigger and more expansive way of seeing the world. 

The more you empower yourself with self-knowledge, the more you engage in intuitive learning, the more you will increase your connection to the Divine.

Begin by asking if you have transcended your culture’s racial, sexual, economic and religious limitations? Have you ever wished you were more like someone else? Are you completely truthful with yourself at all times? Do you ever look back on your life and wish it had been different but you were afraid to change? Are you using your gifts and talents?

If you were to trace the origins of your own beliefs and values, you would find that your family indoctrinated you with their particular way of perceiving things. This is necessary because children need to be given a safe container in order to make meaningful connections. If you were raised in a loving, safe environment you may have little reason to question your inherited belief’s and values. If you were raised in an unstable family environment, you may spend your lifetime reconstructing a safe and meaningful worldview. In either case, if what you were told doesn’t fit who you are, you can at any moment, expand your perception where everything is possible. 

Increasing Self Knowledge Empowers You
You may think you were born knowing who you are but unfortunately self-knowledge is not inherent to your personality or character. Rather, you must choose to have an ongoing dialogue with yourself to clarify and verify what your culture, family and other people have told you. So, the first step to increasing your connection with the Divine is to begin having an honest dialogue with yourself. “To thine own self be true” (Shakespeare) means “do not decieve yourself.” 

This is one of the main reason’s connecting with God is so difficult because without complete honesty, it will be difficult to receive transcendent (universal) knowledge. You need enough self-esteem to want to hear and to act on the intuitive knowledge you receive.

The second reason connecting with God is so difficult is any limiting belief that “God is out there somewhere” and can only be contacted by someone with special power. This simply isn’t true. What IS true is you already have the ability to directly dialogue with God if you have the courage to sincerely engage. 

If you are an extrovert, self-reflection may be more challenging for you then if you are an introvert. Extroverts and introverts have very different pathways in their brains for processing and responding to information. Extroverts learn about themselves through the “world out there” and introvert’s learn about themselves through the “world in here”. So even if you prefer spending most of your time fully engaged and interacting with others, you can still connect with the Divine if you are willing to make the time to tune-in. 

Tuning-In to a More Expansive Well of Knowledge
Very little is taught using right brain, intuitive processes where you tune-in your own inner voice of guidance and turn off your thinking mind. Contemplative practice, creative arts and exercise can help you focus your attention inward and take you “beyond the veil”. The “veil” is everything that obscures what you intuitively know, value and believe. The veil represents any negative teachings that increase your fear and shame and prevent you from learning. As well as any limiting beliefs that you never questioned because you were told, “This is the way things are”. When you go beyond the veil you enter into a more expansive well of knowledge.

How much extra-sensory information you receive through intuitive learning, seeing (clairvoyant), hearing (clairaudient) or feeling (clairessant) is a result of getting beyond your thinking mind’s need to find a logical answer. 

Even now, a part of you already knows God is ever changing and never changing, everything and nothing, full and empty and always a mystery. Intuitive knowledge is wisdom that helps you live a more congruent, joy-filled life. 

Wisdom Helps You Align Your Outer and Inner Life
So what is wisdom? Wisdom is a special kind of knowledge that is both transcendent and transpersonal. Wisdom is not widely valued or taught nor is it accessible through left-brain, interactive learning. Without wisdom, you will never fully understand yourself or the world. 

To get beyond your thinking mind, you need only to alter your perceptions temporarily, sharpen your inward focus and then allow the answers to unfold within you. This refocusing of your awareness will strengthen your unique way of being in the world and help you make sense of it all. It will also bring about practical solutions and “a-ha” moments to everyday problems. 

Whenever you are ready, universal wisdom is inside of you and not somewhere out there. The more you empower yourself with self-knowledge, the more you engage in intuitive learning, the more you will increase your connection to the Divine. 

Here are some steps to help you increase your wisdom: 
1. Make time to get to know yourself without the good opinions of other people. Start something you always wanted to do. Read two self-help books.
2. Meditate, pray, walk and be with nature (including domestic pets), exercise, dance, sing, act, create art and music.
3. Say this affirmation: “Give me discernment and wisdom so that I may understand myself better and increase my connection with God.”
4. Try inward thinking exercises like this: Watch an apple (or any other seeding plant) fall, and then wait to see it eventually sprout. By narrowing your focus on this one cycle for a few minutes each day, you align your consciousness with the life, death and rebirth process–one of the most complex mysteries of the universe. Further meditate upon the meaning of this process. 

A Final Exercise For Increasing Your Connection With the Divine
You have direct access to divine at all times, so you can always ask, “What do I need to know about______(fill in the blank)? And then open your inner seeing, hearing and feeling to receive the answer. You may not always like the answer but know that living in a place that is aligned with your highest truth, will bring more clarity, meaning and joy to your every day life. 

Live Everything

I want to beg you, as much as I can,
to be patient toward all that is unresolved
in your heart and to try to love the questions
themselves like locked rooms and like books
that are written in a very foreign tongue.

Do not seek the answers, which cannot
be given you because you would not be able
to live them.

And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing it, live along
some distant day into the answer.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

The Divine Feminine Way – Awakening to the Beneficial Wholeness of Whole Brain Thinking

With greater understanding of the differences between right and left brain thinking and appreciation of what the divine feminine values, we have the opportunity to return to the beneficial wholeness of both the masculine (ascending) and feminine (descending) aspects of God united in oneness.

By Skye Avalon

For thousands of years we have looked out to the heavens or inside ourselves to contemplate God’s nature. In the process of seeking into a vast emptiness we have forgotten about the sacred power of the present moment which is creatively happening through us and in the world around us. It is time for us all to move beyond culture’s left brain focus on a disembodied and transcendent God, a focus which has split apart spirit and matter (mother). It is time to bring God back the fullness of all that exists.

In Western cultures women and men are taught to live in their minds (left brain) and to doubt their own intuitive and instinctive knowledge (right brain). By primarily valuing the left brain hemisphere, we become disconnected from our bodies and from nature and we limit our potential creativity and our intellectual flexibility to fully experience and understand our lives and the world.

Whole Brain Thinking – Honoring the Divine Feminine

How can we understand and experience the nature of God in her Divine Feminine aspects of fullness and love while still honoring her Divine Masculine aspects of emptiness and freedom? We can begin by becoming more consciously aware in daily life. Then, as we mature and evolve in skill and wisdom, we will learn to connect with the eternal, cosmic mind of God. Most will find that they have reversed this process because of our culture’s predominate focus on a distant God who dwells in Heaven. Either path still leads to the One so that the essential task is to combine and then integrate the two aspects of God to form one whole, non-dual perspective.

“When you seek to know God, you will know nothing and everything at the same time.”

What is Whole Braining Thinking? 

Whole brain thinking is the ability to use both the left and the right brain adeptly. The corpus callosum facilitates this connection – a large band of neural fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres. This connecting band of tissue in women is thicker than in men, raising the question, “How is a woman’s way of experiencing God going to be influenced by this thicker bridge between the two hemispheres?” Because women have an enhanced ability to use both left and right brain hemispheres, women have the most to offer in healing the split between the masculine way of understanding God (emptiness and freedom) with the feminine way of understanding God (fullness, love and the present moment).

What is the Divine Feminine Way to God? 

The feminine IS the core of creation that is LOVE. Creation, love and the Divine Feminine are one and the same. Every woman instinctively knows that she is at the center of this great creative mystery that is unfolding in the moment. The Divine Feminine aspects of God put us in touch with our own bodies, our own imagery and our own truth and in so doing we awaken to what is meaningful in our lives. She values all things as important to the health of the whole and recognizes our mutual connectedness. Her fearless embrace of feeling in the present moment can remind us of the incredible mystery and sacred power of life.

“Non-dual realization embraces both emptiness (masculine) and matter/form (feminine) aspects. “Being” and “becoming” are both parts of a non-dual, self realization.”

What Does the Divine Feminine Value? 

The Divine Feminine values all matter – living beings and nonliving natural objects and also every part of all things – as important to the health of the whole. She recognizes our mutual interdependence and connectedness to all things for survival, well-being and evolutionary vibrancy. She places a great deal of significance on having good relationships based on mutual cooperation and she uses intuitive, instinctive knowledge.

Moving Into Whole Brain Thinking

When women and men remember what the Divine Feminine really values, we realize we must include all perspectives to gain an understanding of the wholeness and connectedness of life. To do so we must dive fearlessly into the mystery of the pain and suffering that is part of the great feminine initiation into the cycles of creation. We honor the Great Mother Goddess when we embrace life as it is. She embodies the wisdom of forgiveness and turns us to what is hidden in darkness to be reborn in a powerful new way. We can then focus on the present moment where anything is possible and no separation exists if we listen to and respond courageously to our intuitive wisdom.

With greater understanding of the differences between right and left brain thinking and appreciation of what the divine feminine values, we have the opportunity to return to the beneficial wholeness of both the masculine (ascending) and feminine (descending) aspects of God united in oneness.

“The only way to transform emptiness is to develop fully in the world of form. The transcendent and immanent worlds have to flavor each other in the vehicle you were born with.” – Ken Wilber

Integrating Divine Feminine and Masculine Principles Into Your Life

Reawakening to the divine feminine is a union of embodying her principles in our daily lives as well as intellectually integrating and including the bright light of masculine consciousness. We combine these two by:

1. Enjoying the world with our five senses while using our sixth sense – intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge makes something known by focusing our attention on universal knowledge or collective consciousness.

2. Seeing the parts then integrating and combining them to form a whole. Western cultures teach the scientific method of separating the parts from the whole and calling them truth. As we broaden our knowledge, we learn that just because something looks true, doesn’t mean it’s the only truth or absolute truth.

3. Being and Becoming – learning to meditate, pray or contemplate while staying in present time, in our bodies, for our own needs as well as the moment’s.

4. Traveling deeply into space to experience emptiness, oneness and freedom and then returning and going deeply into the cycles and mystery of creation in order to become empowered and reborn in a new way. We can master ascending (masculine way to God) and descending (feminine way to God) at the same time.

Exercises for Becoming More Whole Brained

People use to say if you were logical, you were definitely left-brained, and if you were creative, you were definitely right-brained. This is no longer the case. New research indicates that there’s more flexibility in our brains and we can train our brains to become more organized, creative or better able to process all sorts of information. Knowing where our strengths and weaknesses are can help us strengthen the weaker hemisphere. Here are some ways to strengthen the left or right hemispheres:

Left Brain Exercises

1. Make lists – One method of getting into details is to outline what must be done. Bite sized chunks of daily tasks are an excellent way to engage the left hemisphere and also to overcome apparently impossible hurdles.

2. Pay attentions to details – The left hemisphere is about details and linear thinking. Notice the details in the surrounding environment and connect to what is happening through the power of observation.

3. Change your immediate environment – Changing surroundings is an opportunity to change thinking because the mind will not have its familiar environment to cue it into old habits. Create an environment that has beautiful, calming, and enjoyable details.

Right Brain Exercises

1. Keep the bigger picture in mind – Take time to become aware of the greater scheme of life and larger reoccurring patterns.

2. Creative visualization – Learn to quit the chatter in the mind and to allow the spatial, holistic and much more unconscious right brain do its work. Meditation and contemplative practices are useful techniques to quit the left brain.

3. Practice spatial rotation exercises – The right brain is involved in spatial tasks as well as holistic vision. Imagine objects rotating in space. Keep a clear image of the object while it is moving.

4. Learn to trust intuitive information – Allow the right brain the opportunity to function by reflecting on unique and creative thoughts. Honor the insights received through day dreams, visions and imaginings. Relax and enjoy their creative possibilities.

A Woman’s Way of Knowing-Emotional Intelligence and How Women Can Reclaim the Relevance of Right Brain Thinking

The Moon Card of the Tarot represents the emotional, intuitive and unconscious mind. She teaches us that emotional intelligence balanced by logical intelligence is a source of great internal and external power and gives us the ability to move between the mundane, relative world in front of our eyes and the absolute, infinite world behind our eyes.

By Skye Avalon

We have arrived at a very crucial time in human history when our planet and the people on it are experiencing large-scale suffering from disease, starvation and ignorance. We have reached an important moment in our own evolution. Will we choose our own divine progression or more needless suffering?

If we are to choose the path of divine inspiration and wisdom, our evolution must develop the deep-rooted spiritual potential of our emotional right brain just as we have thought our way into developing our logical left brain. Even though each of us prefers one mode of thinking over the other, one of the main challenges for us individually and globally is to attain balance and integration between right brain and left brain thinking. We need whole-brain thinking.

Historically women and men are taught to develop left brain abilities in Western cultures. We have yet to evolve our sense of connectedness to a larger whole – to become in touch with our bodies and emotions and capable of relational sensitivity and intuitive awareness. In this time of global crisis, we can begin to find solutions and we can better understand universal mysteries by validating and learning more about right brain ways of knowing.

What Are the Differences Between Emotional Intelligence and Logical Intelligence?

Our psyches are informed by both emotion and logic. These two basic mental polarities are often referred to as the right brain and the left brain. The right brain’s mode of thinking is random, intuitive, subjective, holistic and it looks at wholes. The left brain’s mode of thinking is logical, sequential, objective, analytical and it looks at parts.

Emotion intelligence archetypal characteristics: right brain, feminine, moon, yin

Emotional intelligence preceded the evolution of logical thinking. It is older and more deeply embedded in our psyches. Emotional, instinctual, intuitive knowledge sits underneath our conscious awareness and influences everything we do. It informs our underlying psychological and emotional character and physical body. It is the relational matrix where familial and ancestral patterns were established deep in our past. It is receptive and spontaneous in nature and changeable and fluctuating in character. Emotional intelligence affects our behavior on many levels and is shared cross-culturally through archetypes.

The emotional right brain understands the language of archetypes and uses symbols and pictures, not words. It also receives information from inside and outside the body such as color, vibration and tone.

To become a good right brain thinker means to grasp concepts without words, feeling them, knowing them, letting the left brain logic wait until it has had the chance to become aware of the left brain information patterns, at which time they can be applied to action.

Logical intelligence archetypal characteristics: left brain, masculine, sun, yang

Logical thinking is given prominent relevance in Western cultures. Historically we have made great gains towards autonomous individuality through active achievement in the world and through consciousness of self-hood. The intellect (logic, reason, cognition) forms the center of our personal identities. It is usually visible and measurable. Logical intelligence gives us the ability to go out into the world and achieve and manifest ourselves through our personal identities and character.

Whole Brain Thinking

Most individuals have a preference for one of these styles of thinking while some people are more whole-brained and equally adept at both modes. Whole brain thinking is the ability to use both the left and right brain adeptly. This kind of thinking is facilitated by the corpus callosum – a large band of neural fibers that connects the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain. This connecting band of tissue in women is thicker than in men, raising the question, “How is a woman’s way of thinking going to be influenced by this thicker bridge between the two hemispheres?” One answer is that the thicker connection enhances a woman’s emotional, relational and intuitive abilities. Women tend to be stronger than men in empathy, verbal skills and social skills. Men tend to be stronger in independence, dominance, mathematical skills and three dimensional or spatial tasks.

What is normal for women is different then what is normal for men. A certain way of thinking is not better then the other. What the growing research suggests is that the mental divide between women and men is more complex and rooted in biology then we have previously understood. The more we know about how men and women think, the abler we are to provide the tools our teachers, mentors and leaders need to communicate and encourage others to develop whole brain thinking skills.

A Way Forward – Validating Right Brain Thinking

Right brain thinking is often misunderstood and feared because it is non-linear and difficult to measure. Since women have more innate ability in right brain thinking, women may have the most to offer in healing the split between the polarities of the mind and moving the collective towards more whole brain thinking. This is because emotional intelligence by its very nature instinctively wants to nurture connections between people and communities. If we were to collectively validate emotional intelligence, we would have more integral and balanced solutions for individual, community and global problems.

Women Leading the Way – From Right Brain Thinking to More Whole Brain Thinking

One of the challenges of accessing right brain knowledge is that it needs to be brought to our conscious awareness through our own efforts. The more we become accustomed to interpreting the archetypal language patterns of the right side of the brain, the more self-knowledge and awareness we develop to make the inner changes that empower us and those around us. Women have the knowledge to lead the way forward to more whole brain thinking. Here are some of the steps we can take to get there:

1. No longer doubt our inner knowledge. The first task for women is to empower our inner masculine with enough internal authority (self esteem and personal power) to move feeling, intuitive and visionary ideas out into the world. Once we empower ourselves, we can then teach others through our ideas, words and action.

Men must move towards greater relational awareness (right brain) by taking the journey down into their own inner feminine, integrate their emotions and intuitive awareness and then transform their inner knowledge into wise use of power and empathetic action in the world.

2. Rename and actively use emotional intelligence rather then waiting for the collective to validate right brain information and knowledge.

3. Reintroduce the importance of archetypal storytelling (a language rich in metaphor and symbolism) beyond popular culture (movies, music, videos, comic books, etc.) and move it into public institutions and boardrooms.

4. Encourage others to become more whole-brained in their orientation by: · Supporting schools that give equal weight to the arts, creativity and skills of imagination and synthesis and that teach inner awareness skills and interpretation and how to move right brain thinking into whole brain action and results. · Supporting teachers, mentors, and leaders who use instruction techniques that connect with both sides of the brain and incorporate patterning, archetypes, metaphors, role-playing, sound and movement as well as reading and analytical activities. · Developing new forms of assessment that honor right brain talent and skill.

It is important for women to honor and respect their feminine gifts. Women can find a powerful place inside where they can courageously express their knowledge. When women communicate their truth, we will begin to see it reflected in our world and others will begin to respect, honor and value the feminine way of knowing.

To learn more about the abilities of the right brain and left brain, see these YouTube videos or take the Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test by the Art Institute of Vancouver. Which one are you?

How it Feels to Have a Stroke by Jille Bolte Taylor, February 2008, Monterey, California (see html link)

Men’s Brain Women’s Brain, by Mark Gungor (see html link)

The Right Brain vs Left Brain Creativity Test by the Art Institute of Vancouver.

The Search for a Meaningful Life – the Fool Archetype

By Skye Avalon

Affirming the Fool Archetype Within
The beginning of your life is full of questions and doubts. “What will I be when I grow up? Who will I fall in love with? Will I be rich or poor? When will I die?” The purpose of your inner Fool is to humbly ask questions and to cultivate an open mind throughout life. 

If you find yourself asking and then seeking the answer to the question, “What’s my life all about?” -an enormous philosophical question – then you may also be a “Seeker” or a “Mystic” and someone who realizes life and happiness is about more then what you own or how much power you wield in the world. 

The Search for a Meaningful Life
It seems almost everyone desires a life filled with joy, freedom and peace. But how do you get there? Where is my personal road map to living a meaningful life? 

The truth is a meaningful life is a huge learning experience where your personal road map always redirects you back towards the questions that answer the ultimate truth of your heart and mind’s greatest fulfillment. In other words, learning about yourself and “self-knowledge” is the most empowered path to take. 

Of course, it is always your choice whether you live your life consciously or unconsciously. Whether you decide to do so or not is often represented by the curiosity of your inner Fool archetype because it is this aspect of who you are that gives you permission to ask questions and get around the fears and conclusive answers of your know-it-all ego. 

Which Path Shall I Take?
Whether your own life is currently full of all the joy the world can offer or full of despair, there is no way to understand the human condition without a personal act of faith and surrender to a bigger answer. It is a matter of your own free choice as to whether or not you want to begin the journey to greater self-knowledge. 

The focus of these current times has become the satisfaction of endless desires that results in much outer wealth but very little inner wealth – joy, freedom or peace. As a result most people are living life unconsciously at the mercy of their egos, in a place of confusion, doubt, emptiness and fear. 

If you are someone more focused on nurturing self-knowledge, you have realized that inner wealth and joy is the result of turning inward. Having the courage to be a “Fool” on your journey, you begin to understand that you are both a human being and a divine being and that living a life full of meaning is a very precious gift. 

Choosing to live your life consciously is hard work, but it will bring you much joy, freedom and peace. At the end of your journey, you will have learned and understood who you really are and your connection to the nature of the universe. And most importantly, you will have experienced great joy, peace and happiness in the process. 

If you have not yet begun, here is a handy checklist: 

Beginning the Journey
1. First and foremost, in order to begin, you must ask the question, “What do I need to know about myself, other people, and the world?” You may be ridiculed and teased as you ask questions and seek answers. Sometimes the answers may not be part of your religious background, culture or heritage. Even so, you can move forward each time you feel doubt and fear by cultivating faith and love. 

2. The second important task is mastering and understanding your individual sense of self by asking “Who am I?” 

3. The third task is surrendering yourself completely to a higher Source of inspiration in order to gain wisdom about the human condition and the true nature of the world. The act of surrendering completely to this quest for truth is considered the greatest leap of faith and folly in the world. Here you must be willing to suspend what you think you know for what you long to know and you must have the curiosity and open mind of a child. 

4. The final task is the process of living in congruence with a higher and universal code of conduct. To become conscious means sacrificing and growing your intellect to be placed in the service of the Creator. You will know the whole truth once your head and heart are united. 

It does not matter in what name or form that the universal truth comes to you. You are simply to follow the path set before you. It will lead you in the best way to suit your particular nature. Whatever way you recognize, loving and taking in Divine truth is the way Source recognizes, loves and takes joy in you. So begin the journey!

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon–do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.

Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
–Constantine P. Cavafy

Contemplation for the Fool archetype within you
1. Do I consider myself a Seeker?
2. Do I want to begin the journey?
3. What is the trial of contemporary times?
4. What was the trial of past times?
5. How do I know when I am living my life consciously?
6. What questions do I have about life?
7. What can I begin to understand and learn in the journey toward self-knowledge?
8. What do I give up in order to gain wisdom and knowledge about the human condition?
9. How does the evolution of my own awareness change the world?
10. What do I need to know about ___________?

Exercise: Write Your Life Story
Write your life story as a simple narrative time line. Start with your childhood and go on to adolescence and your early 20s. If you are older, continue on to midlife, maturity, and old age. Consider the influence of your family, culture, and gender on your self-development. Write about what you want to become and your greatest life purpose, dreams and inspirations.

Ask: “What do I need to know?”

Path to Empowerment – The Evolutionary Stages to Spiritual Power

Empowerment is knowledge of how power works in the world merged with self-knowledge and personal authority. You earn inner power through careful self-reflection and a honest evaluation of your thoughts, emotions and actions.

By Skye Avalon

This is a remarkable time in human history when an infinite amount of information and knowledge is converging with the freedom to choose what to learn. Many people now have direct access to this infinite information through the Internet and the available time to pursue and cultivate a path to both outer and inner knowledge. Pursuing both forms of knowledge can lead to empowerment and spiritual power if you are willing to take full responsibility for evolving your own consciousness.

Because the path to empowerment is evolutionary, there is a difference between the external power you attain in the world, the inner power (empowerment) you earn from daily self-reflection and the spiritual power you cultivate from having access to your own personal and spiritual authority.

The Three Stages of Evolutionary Power

External power leads you to what you think you desire. The problem with external power is by the time you get there, you realize you want something else. This can result in a lifetime of chasing what you desire while leaving you bankrupt on the inside. Empowerment (inner power) represents mastery of your emotions and thoughts in response to the outer world and gives you direct access to your own personal authority. It aligns you with what you really want which is a positive state of physical, emotional and mental well-being. Spiritual power brings you clarity of thought, inner peace and awakens you to your own divine essence and the divine light in another.

Stage 1 – Power

You learn about how to use your power in the world before you learn about inner power. This learning process is necessary because the human mind needs to be given a container in which to make meaningful connections to things. So, in the first half of life you must develop a strong enough ego to take on the outer world and an adequate sense of personal identity to help you interact and survive in the world. How well you manage your power will be reflected in the outcome of every decision you make. In the physical world of actions and consequences, you will be held responsible for your choices when you act in your own name. Using your power in your own name is most often focused on the satisfaction of endless desires resulting in external wealth but very little inner wealth or happiness.

Power could be directed toward positive actions that support yourself, those you love and all other beings but in these narcissistic times, external power is a grand illusion marketed by sellers. So often what is sold appears to be the answer to what you seek and because it is visible, it seems more useful than mastery of inner power. But as life progresses, issues in relationships regarding use of power, sex, money and self-esteem start to surface and develop into mental, emotional, physical and spiritual problems. It isn’t until you experience some kind of failure, loss in a relationship or a challenging illness that you realize your personal power is limited and the physical world cannot be controlled. These difficult experiences can actually become blessings because they provide you with the opportunity to learn about your inner world of emotions and thoughts so the choices you make with your inner power become creative acts of outer power that benefit all.

Stage 2 – Empowerment (outer power united with inner power) 

Either during a personal crisis or by mid-life, your ego is asked to develop an interior dialogue with your inner self and act in accordance with these insights. Empowerment is knowledge of how power works in the world merged with self-knowledge and personal authority. You earn inner power through careful self-reflection and a honest evaluation of your thoughts, emotions and actions. Over time you gain direct access to personal authority – the source for solving life challenges and for pursuing a life with meaning and purpose.

Inner power cultivated with growing consciousness helps your break free from negative thought patterns and leads you to the realization that your conscious actions in the world reflect your interests and passion in living a life congruent with your highest purpose. Self-knowledge and personal authority reward you with a meaningful inner life and outer life that has value and significance for the human community. Your increased self-awareness moves the planet positively forward for all beings.

The journey to empowerment encompasses some of these tasks:

• Liberating yourself from disempowering and limiting beliefs

• Integrating many perceptions and beliefs

• Moving past your personality and embracing your authentic self

• Forgiving and letting go of the past and rejecting victimhood

• Rewriting your personal history

• Discovering your own truths and then being true to yourself

• Taking responsibility for your choices and their consequences

• Being able to stand for your own truth and trusting in life

• Being emotionally rational by striving for objectivity which gives you the power of choice

• Relinquishing sexual power in order to aspire toward personal success and intimate union with other women and men in a way that is not sexual at all

• Standing autonomously and not wavering

Buddhist version of EMPOWERMENT the Laws of Life – Nonviolence, truthfulness, integrity, purity and self-referral.

Stage 3 – Spiritual Power (outer power + inner power + global knowledge and cosmic wisdom) 

Spiritual power begins with the recognition that you are responsible for your relationship with a higher power (God). The activation of inner power can lead you to realize your own divine nature since you are the source of your own personal authority. In the process of accessing inner knowledge, you become more aware of the guiding spiritual power of intuitive information. Your intuition (your inner guidance system) is the foundation for building a relationship with the divine in an intimate and manageable format that resonates deeply with your own particular personality.

Spiritual power is about choosing to go beyond yourself and seeing the same divine light in another. Expanding on inner guidance through a spiritual practice will help you become expansive enough to integrate and include all that has ever been. Merging the flow of power, inner power, global knowledge and cosmic wisdom will give you direct access to your own spiritual power.

The journey to spiritual power encompasses some of these tasks:

• Having a passion to know the answer to life’s most challenging questions

• Studying the sacred texts of your culture, including them and moving beyond them · Believing in something greater than yourself

• Recognizing and honoring your connection to the whole cosmos

• Expanding your horizons and awareness by having an open mind

• Creating a sacred space a practicing inner silence

• Releasing your ego’s identification with the material world and the mind

• Establishing a contemplative practice to remind you that you are loved and never alone

• Integrating and aligning your outer and inner power with the will of God · Practicing symbolic sight and embracing spiritual truth

• Surrendering illusions in order to receive divine truth

• Being love and energy to co-create the world you desire

Buddhist version of SPIRITUAL POWER the Rules of Life – Simplicity, contentment, purification, refinement and surrender.

Changes – Diving Into the Cave of Your Heart

When you act from the highest, you will not only feel the delight of such a connection but others will be uplifted in your presence and get a hit of their own Divine light.

By Skye Avalon

As we transition from winter into spring, this is a great time to be inspired in our lives.

Notice all of the changes taking place in nature as the weather warms and every day becomes longer. There is a palpable sense of renewal of life. Plants are literally breaking free from the earth and stretching toward the sun. Flowers are blooming. There is a vitality that you can even smell in the spring winds.

The invitation in this season of growth is to align with the powerful forces of nature both outside and within. All of the seeds of intention that you have planted in the fall and cultivated in the winter can now begin to emerge into manifestation. This is the time to make shifts in ways of being and doing that harness these powerful creative energies.

The word for transformation in Sanskrit is “parynama”. “Pary” means to encircle one’s heart. “Nama” means to make an offering. Together, the word suggests that an authentic transformation is made by looking deeply into the cave of your heart and then making sweet offerings from what you discover.

This is the time to unveil your contemplations and reflections. Let your deepest and most cherished desires bear fruit as you dig deep inside the wellspring of your heart and express who you are into the world. When you align so deeply with who you are, whatever you do or say will feel like you are offering your highest. When you act from the highest, you will not only feel the delight of such a connection but others will be uplifted in your presence and get a hit of their own Divine light.

If you have been waiting for the right time to launch some important project, venture, business, or other offering, this is a great opportunity. This is a wonderful season to harness the creative energies of nature and skillfully ride the waves of change to affirm your life and make a beautiful offering to the world.

Make sure that as you make your offering that it is in fact aligned with your heart. The transformation may not always be comfortable as change may take you out of your comfort zone. However, when you remember your intention, it will give you renewed energy and inspiration to hold to that vision. In the process, you awaken to a new understanding of yourself and your relationship to the world. It is not just in your mind, but the transformation will affect your heart. By aligning with your depths, you will feel the delight of spirit as the very play of consciousness. As the Divinehas taken every form, including you, the invitation is that you shift your form to feel a closer relationship to the Divine. As you shift in relationship with the Divine in this way, you will feel Divine!

Seeking Wholeness – The Balance of Feminine and Masculine Energies

We all have a mix of masculine and feminine energies in a dynamic state of movement.

By Skye Avalon

Entering into a new year and a new decade is a great time for us to reflect on ourselves and to use our insight to optimize our lives.

We all have a mix of masculine and feminine energies in a dynamic state of movement.

The masculine energies are characterized by linearity, orientation to goals, and mental focus.

The feminine energies are circular, concerned by feeling and emotion, and they expand the mind.

Instead of seeing these energies as gender specific, we can shift the paradigm by seeing these as how the Divine has taken consciousness. The play of consciousness is that it lives in ways that are always pulsing between contraction and expansion. Indeed, we directly experience this pulsation in our lives. Whether we know it or not, this pulsation is happening microscopically in each of our cells and cosmically in the life of the universe.

When you cease to label these energies and reject associated cultural biases, you distill them to pure energy. You then can see and operate at the spiritual level.

The process of self reflection can be one in which you contemplate and journal about how these primary energies manifest in your life. What is your tendency when managing your job, handling family matters, and relating to other people? Again, we all have a mix of these energies and the proportion changes with every context. There are, however, distinct patterns that emerge if you only begin to become aware of them and then articulate them.

Having explored and then discovered your patterns in the way that you live your life, you can achieve a more fulfilling life by balancing your energies.

You will have a preference about how you do things in your life. We are all creatures of habit. The question is, “are these habits serving your vision in the highest way?” If not (this is the self reflection piece), it is up to you to cultivate that energy that is suppressed or undeveloped in order to integrate your self.For example, when you find that you tend to place high value on your feelings rather than on analysis when arriving at a decision, you can begin to find integration by bringing your mind into play. You are invited to integrate these energies into a divinely synchronized pulsation.

Practice attuning to a bigger energy that holds all of these energies within you. The more that you remember the source of everything within you, the easier it will be to align these energies in ways that bring greater harmony to your life. A great indicator of enhanced harmony is when you experience a deeper sense of peace and fulfillment in the application of this practice. A deeper intuition and intelligence will sense when your energies have reached a dynamic balance and you will have reached that long awaited sense of wholeness that every human being innately seeks.

This is the way of a balanced life. The integration of the primary energies of the universe into a divine relationship. May you continue to remember to align with your highest part in ways that bring greater harmony to all the parts of you.

Trusting and Receiving Inner Guidance Using Divination Tools

Visual tools can expand and deepen your connection with something more meaningful.

By Skye Avalon

Trusting and Receiving Inner Guidance

“Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up
enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”
–Samuel Ullman

Making the time and effort to have a meaningful conversation with God is really about your desire to actively transform and expand your own awareness and deepen your connection with something more meaningful. Divination tools such as pendulums, numerology, astrology, bones, ruins etc., and have been used for thousands of years to help people understand the meaning of life and the world around them. Divination tools can help you focus your awareness, help you learn more about your self and the world around you, and put you in conscious contact with your own intuitive wisdom and a universal source of intelligence. So, the tarot is just one of the many tools available to increase your understanding and self-knowledge. Although the tarot was originally rooted in occult tradition, interest in tools like the tarot has evolved, changed and expanded in the past few decades to include a wide variety of spiritual and religious perspectives. 

Of course, you don’t need to use divination tools (pendulums, numerology, astrology, bones, ruins etc.) to help you to communicate with God. However, these tools can help some people before they take the most powerful step of communicating directly with God.

But what if it is difficult for you to believe in using such tools for inner guidance? 
The best thing to do in this situation is to suspend your doubt temporarily in order to give yourself the opportunity to try something new. Continue to focus your mind’s attention on the affirmation imagery and repeat the words. Following your breath can also help you stay focused. 

How do you know when you are receiving inner guidance? 
You may see visions, or hear or feel something. Sometimes as you go about the day, a new understanding will come to the forefront of your mind, or perhaps you will suddenly realize you know something new or you will have one of those “a-ha” moments. 

You can become more aware of inner guidance through diligent and prolonged spiritual practice. There are many options, depending on your spiritual or religious background, such as active ritual, contemplative prayer, intensive meditation, shamanic voyage and many more. Additionally, there are many helpful communication tools, like these affirmation cards, which can be a fun part of your understanding of yourself and God. 

The Wisdom Cards and Archetypal Imagery – What is an Archetype?
The illustrated archetypal imagery for the 22 wisdom cards was chosen to illuminate the teachings of each affirmation. Archetypes are powerful because they speak to you through both your body and mind in the form of dreams, visions, stories, art, music, metaphors and myths. Archetypes are the symbolic building blocks of a language understood and shared by people throughout history. 

Carl Jung believed human beings were born hardwired with these archetypal patterns of meaning and this made people unique in their ability to reflect upon themselves. He believed archetypal thinking was an evolutionary leap in human development since thinking had developed into more than problem solving for survival. Thinking can actually recreate itself in an endless upward spiral of new understandings, meanings and expanding awareness! 

Archetypal images will hopefully inspire and interest you to take a closer look into the invisible realms of energy, light and space. Archetypes teach that what is invisible is much more powerful and mysterious than what is visible. 

How Archetypes Work
Archetypal imagery functions in your mind as a bridge between your own awareness and the collective awareness of the global human family. A more metaphorical way of understanding archetypes is to think of them as the roots of a tree. The roots are where all people have a shared meaning, purpose and understanding. The branches are people’s cultural and personal beliefs and values. 

Every culture has a unique perspective on what is significantly valuable and meaningful for their societies; however, people around the world all share similarities of meaning and value when given a much larger context in which to describe experiences.

The Importance of Our Shared Archetypal Language
Because of the enormous challenges and conflicts facing contemporary people around the world, we must collectively return to the source of our knowledge, rediscovering the universal archetypal language we all share in order to survive. One of the most important adventures of our lifetime and humanity’s greatest challenge isn’t the exploration of outer space, but rather the exploration of inner space.

You can become more fluent in archetypal communication and become more aware of archetypes and their deeper meanings by interpreting your dreams, stories, music and art, and by creating a sacred space for internal contemplation. Paying attention to and understanding archetypes can give you the opportunity to learn a language which can put you in direct dialogue with God. Seeing and then understanding the bigger picture through archetypal imagery is a good place for you to start creating solutions for yourself and others. 

About the Major Arcana Cards of the Tarot
The tarot is one of the many tools available to increase your self-knowledge. The Major Arcana cards of the tarot are the first 22 cards of a traditional 78-card deck. The Major Arcana cards are very special because they contain deep and complex archetypal meaning. Like dreams, visions, stories, music and myths, the Major Arcana cards bring together the visual power of archetypal imagery. 

They are given added weight during a traditional tarot reading. In the Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess set, the spiritual guidebook and wisdom cards work together with you to tap into your intuitive wisdom. You bring your personality, personal beliefs and values to the experience.
In this set, each Major Arcana card symbolizes some universal aspect of the human experience as you grow in awareness towards self-knowledge and spiritual development. The 22 cards represent the major archetypal patterns of human psychological growth, whether they occur within one snapshot of your life or your whole lifetime. Since your life may be experienced as life lessons in no particular sequence, each card represents a piece of the puzzle and the possibility of more knowledge and understanding no matter what your path to God is.

Tap Into Your Highest by Being of Service

It is the invitation of the Universe that you full receive your gifts and then cultivate them in ways that you can offer them in skillful ways of service so that you can be a being that spreads more joy to the planet.

By Skye Avalon

The secret to inner transformation is to orient yourself in unfamiliar ways. If you are always thinking only of yourself, life gets narrow and your energy can get easily get blocked. You may be operating along grooves that don’t serve you in the highest way.

How do you make a change that will propel you to expand your energies and ultimately allow you to feel a deep sense of contentment and even joy? Shift your orientation to how you can be of service to something other than just yourself.

If you feel, however, that you are being compelled to be of service and that the motivation is externally driven, then it can actually drain your energy and diminish you. For example, if you are stuck in a service-related job and you are only doing it for the money and not because of any natural enthusiasm for the nature of the work or the desire to help your customers, you will be looking at the clock the entire time. Time will seem to be going very slowly and at the end of the work day you will feel drained. At the worst if you are forced into service and you resist its call, it could actually humiliate you.

On the other hand, when you shift your attitude and truly dedicate yourself and your efforts to being of service, there is a magical expansion of your energies. Instead of feeling diminished, all parts of you are called into action when your align with your heart’s intention. By changing your vision to a higher intention, the veils of limitation clear and you can harness those deeper resources within you. By tapping into this wellspring of energy in response to the call to service, not only do you have a powerful capacity to help others, but also, you can sustain your energy and not “burn out”.

Take time in your life to pause and reflect on where you can be of most service. Everyone has been gifted with natural talents. It is the invitation of the Universe that you full receive your gifts and then cultivate them in ways that you can offer them in skillful ways of service so that you can be a being that spreads more joy to the planet. It is this pulsation of being receptive of what life has to offer and then giving back that is so simple and profound.

When you orient yourself to nature by giving back through service, you will find that you are no longer depleted and empty. Rather, when you act from your heart in skillful ways, the Universe will fill you up so much that you will feel completely full. When you feel so abundant, then you will feel content and no longer will there be the vibration of desiring something outside of you. This is the paradox of life, the more you give, the more that you will feel complete.

Affirmations Goddess Deck Tarot Club Interview

Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess deck by Artist and Author Skye Avalon

Affirmations Goddess Deck Tarot Club Interview With Tarot Club President, Tina Swanson.

The following is my interview with Skye Avalon; author and artist of Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess deck. She wrote and designed a spiritual guide book along with her beautifully illustrated 22 wisdom cards for contemplation & prayer. The following post will be our interview and then members will have a great opportunity to ask Pamela questions thereafter. Skye has agreed to answer what she can and is really excited to interact with members directly.

Tina: Could you please tell us a little bit about your background?

Skye: I have been working as a commercial illustrator, graphics and web designer for many years. In the emerging field of digital artwork, I have developed my own unique style of painting. My artwork has been published in digital how-to publications and I have written how-to digital articles for both local and national publications. After publication of the Goddess deck, I began working as a fine artist. 

Tina: Why did you decide to create a deck on your own?

Skye: Initially, I was approached by a publisher to illustrate a deck for women. After doing some initial research by calling about two dozen tarot artists willing to share their experiences, I decided not to. What I heard didn’t make business sense for me in royalties (income earned) for the amount of time it would take for me to illustrate a complete deck set in my detailed, illustrative style. Despite this, I continued painting and a few years later I signed a contract with a different publisher. About 2 years into the process they canceled the contract after restructuring the company. So, there I was with finished cards and book and no publisher! I was very disappointed but not discouraged.

Fortunately at the same time I was doing product design work for a client who contracts with overseas manufacturers and I realized I had most of the skills and the financial resources I needed to publish and market the deck myself – graphic design, illustration, writing, prepress and marketing. I created a business plan and the business plan made sense if I contracted the printing with an overseas printer.

Tina: What inspired you to create the Affirmations for the Everyday Goddessdeck?

Skye: It started with a very challenging portfolio review I did through the Society of Illustrators. I was doing a lot of work as a commercial illustrator at the time and so after years of doing technical illustrations I felt it was time to try something more creative. During the portfolio review I was told I needed to focus on one style I really loved and felt passionate about. It was great advice but I couldn’t help but wonder if it would pay the bills especially since the first two paintings were an angel and Sophia, the goddess of wisdom!

Tina: The Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess deck consists of the 22 Major Arcana cards and a guidebook. Why did you decide to use the majors only? Would you consider adding the minors in the future?

Skye: I realized after talking to other artists and looking at the royalties earned that it would not make sense for me to spend so many years painting in my very detailed style. Limitations of time and money helped me to think about how I could create a deck that would be meaningful, useful, and unique and of high quality for both Tarot enthusiasts and those unfamiliar with the Tarot and just wanted a guiding tool. 

Tina: What makes this deck a collector’s edition? Will it be followed up with something else?

Skye: Yes, after this initial printing, I will be enhancing the book copy, card frames and box design. This Collector’s edition is the only edition that will have gold metallic ink. The next edition will be called the 2nd edition. Because I am the creator of a self-published deck, I can take more risks in how the work is presented and be very selective in the quality and limit distribution of the artwork.

Tina: The back of the cards have a leopard coming out of a luscious green jungle. Most decks have very plain backs, what made you decide to spice yours up a bit?

Skye: As you and many practicing Tarot Club members know, for those who do reversals, plain backs are needed so the querent can’t see whether the card is upside down. Additionally, the Major Arcana cards are very special because they contain deep and complex archetypal meaning. This is why I paid very close attention to creating imagery (including painting a story on the backs of the cards) that would inspire seekers to take a closer look at the rich, mystical meaning within each card. So, focusing a deck on the Major Arcana gives seekers of all skill levels an easy-to-use tool for inner guidance and can help focus the mind during contemplation and prayer.

Inner guidance can be received in so many ways! For those who have spent time studying the Tarot, guidance can come from a traditional or more comprehensive Major Arcana spread using just the majors.

For those unfamiliar with the Tarot, inner guidance can come by simply focusing the mind on the card imagery and/or affirmations. Any way a seeker intuits they would like to receive inner guidance is perfect with this set of cards.

I believe that paying attention to and understanding the archetypal imagery of the Major Arcana gives us all the opportunity to learn about archetypes and helps us evolve into a more direct dialogue with God.

Tina: Your guidebook concentrates more on obtaining true wisdom from the cards through contemplation and prayer and finding answers from within rather than through the more traditional methods of seeking information through outside sources. What moved you to go this direction?

Skye: I believe we have arrived at a very crucial time in human history and we will either choose our own divine evolution or more needless suffering. If we are to choose the path of inspiration and wisdom, we must evolve into our deeper potential of our emotional, intuitive right brain to become whole-brained thinkers.

This deck is designed to encourage anyone to become more trusting of their own inner guidance (right brain thinking) by using the tarot as a tool to increase and more easily access emotional, instinctual and intuitive skills. Divination tools like the Tarot are meant to help us communicate with God before taking the most powerful step of communicating directly with God.

I wrote the guidebook from a universal and evolutionary perspective of the human experience growing in awareness towards greater self-knowledge and spiritual development. The definitions given by most decks are integrated into the guidebook.

The guidebook is written with the purpose of providing clarity and bringing back into focus the wisdom teachings of the Major Arcana right down to their alchemical, mystical roots. There is a question and answer section at the end of each chapter for everyday mystics ready and brave enough to work through them!

Tina: How long of a process was it from the beginning to the completion of the deck?

Skye: This entire project included illustration of the cards, writing the guidebook, designing the book, cards and box and managing overseas printing. All of this was integrated into my working week when I was able to find the extra time. From the day I was contacted by the first publisher to the date of delivery, I believe the conception, production and completion of the project has taken about eight years! One painting can take me several weeks to complete.

Tina: What was the easiest card to create? What was the most difficult?

Skye: The High Priest card was the easiest to create because it was a close-up portrait and I didn’t need to work out all the compositional detail that was needed in the other cards.

The Tower card was the most difficult because I am more comfortable painting figurative compositions of people and animals rather then compositions of structures like exploding towers!

Tina: Did you encounter any major issues or problems when making or creating the deck?

Skye: Nothing too major was encountered. Although there was one stressful period of time during the printing process when the printer in Thailand accidentally printed the gold metallic plates in the wrong sequence. We ended up reprinting the box wraps for all of the boxes. The delay was two-months due to the extra time it takes to work long distance and to reproof the final comps.

Tina: Anything you regret or you wish you could redo?

Skye: I would hire another editor to proof the last-minute proof! I introduced a few typos in the last draft.

Tina: Do you use your own cards for direction or advise for yourself or others?

Skye: Yes, I do use my cards for my own readings and for focusing my mind during meditation. I especially like reading the Wisdom Prayer Guide card because for me it is comforting. 

Tina: Do you read tarot cards and if so for how long and how did you get interested in the Tarot?

Skye: I don’t read tarot cards although I certainly could. Rather, I prefer to do “Sacred Contract” readings. (More information about a Sacred Contract reading is on my blog). One of the humbling realizations I had when studying the mystical aspects of the tarot was how much profound, universal wisdom each card contains which is a demonstration of the timeless value and power of archetypal imagery. Even before I illustrated the tarot, I had been interested in the study of transpersonal psychology, integral transformative spiritual practice and the evolution of human consciousness so for me, using divination tools was all about learning the divine feminine way of knowing (right brain thinking).

Tina: What are some of your favorite decks?

Skye: I like the Aleister Crowley Thoth Tarot and the Zerner Farber Tarot deck. I also have a French deck called the Tarot Francais Des Fleur. My mother bought it for me in France and because I am so visually oriented, I really enjoy looking at the illustrations.

Tina: What plans do you have in the future? Do you have any more tarot decks, books or artistic endeavors that we might be interested in?

Skye: I am working on building a new collection of fine artworks in oil paint. Of course, any art work I paint in the future has everything to do with empowering the goddess in us all. 

Tina: To help others learn more about the depth of your deck, in a nutshell how would you describe your deck?

Skye: The goddess represents the highest example of divine wisdom and inner guidance. The process to self-knowledge is a feminine task (turning inward) for both men and women. She take us down into our souls.

The 22 MA of the tarot represent the archetypal steps we take to “step behind the veil” (High Priestess) in order to deepen our self-knowledge, wisdom and connection with all beings and the Divine. Using the 22 MA as a powerful tool, we learn the mysteries of the universe and can find the answer to questions of our higher purpose and deep meaning. We begin the journey by asking the question (the Fool) “Who am I?

Our planet is at a tipping point and the solutions we seek for complex global problems are WITHIN US. Time is of the essence and we must all become “Everyday Mystics” by learning to use inner guidance tools that help us talk to God and until we are ready to talk to God directly. Of course there are many ways to talk to the divine and learn about the Self. This deck set is one more helpful tool for Seekers.

Tina: Is there anything else you would like Tarot Club members to know or be aware of? Any thoughts or things you would like to bring to our attention?

Skye: For those who are interested in more information, the deck set can be ordered directly (Retail: $14.95) through my blog store. They can also be purchased online at Amazon or Ebay or at your local bookstore or gift shop. For those in retail sales and who like the convenience of consolidated purchases, New Leaf Distribution and DeVorss and Company distribute the Affirmations for the Everyday Goddess deck.

There is an iPhone app for anywhere convenience or for those on a more limited budget. The deck set iPhone app can be purchased through www.consciousnessapps.com or through the Apple app store in the lifestyle section for $3.99. The iPhone app includes all the cards and guidebook except the explanatory introduction chapters.

Finally, I write articles for my blog called The Divine Feminine Way. I welcome Tarot Club members who may be interested to sign-up. 

Tina, it’s been a real pleasure answering your questions. Thank you so much for asking!

Tina: I just want to thank you personally and on behalf of the Tarot Club for taking the time to do this interview. The Affirmations of the Everyday Goddess is a truly inspirational & beautifully illustrated deck. Any collector would be proud to add this deck to their collection.

We are so happy that you have decided to become a member of our humble Tarot community; there will always be a place for you here!

I would also like to thank you for your generosity, in sending me a copy of your gorgeous deck, I will add it to my personal collection and cherish it always.

The Return of the Feminine – the Goddess Archetype

By honoring and learning about feminine ways of perceiving, you enhance your own well-being and the well-being of those around you.

By Skye Avalon

The feminine principle is reemerging in the collective consciousness of humanity. 

By honoring and learning about feminine ways of perceiving, you enhance your own well-being and the well-being of those around you.

Here are some of the most important developmental tasks of the feminine:

Learning to see behind your eyes is an inward task, requiring you first to learn about who you are. To develop this skill, it is essential to regularly reflect on your own behaviors and your ways of relating to others and to your environment. Over time your ability to perceive even more will grow and evolve. The greater the depth of your inquiry into yourself, the higher the revelations of truth and reality you will experience.

Integration is the task of combining parts together to form a whole. By looking at all the important truths of the great contemplative traditions and human transformational teachings and putting them together, you will discover what works best for you. By development of “looking at the big picture” and simultaneously fully participating in your own life challenges, you learn and become wiser.

Valuing all matter–living beings, nonliving natural objects and every part of all things is important to the health of the whole. The feminine principle in nature recognizes the mutual interdependence and interconnectedness of all things for survival, well-being and evolutionary vibrancy, and it will fearlessly protect and fight for all life. By placing a great deal of significance on having good relationships based on mutual cooperation and intuitive, instinctive knowledge, the parts come together to make systems more complex. Over time, matter and awareness expand and evolve. You are part of nature, and you can apply these principles in your own life. 

The feminine is all about being in touch with your own body, imagery and truth. As a child, you were aware of your own body but the mental aspects of your development were probably emphasized more. As a result, over time your body becomes an abstract concept. 

It is one thing for you to know something in your head; it is totally a different thing to know something in your body. The process of growing up is not only a developmental task but also about bringing your mind (masculine) and your body (feminine) together. When you learn to mother yourself with presence and love, all matter, including your body, becomes precious. 

Intentionality, synchronicity, paradox, self-nourishment, surrender and holding boundaries are all feminine tasks that help you identify and open the doors to positive experiences while simplifying your life in order to focus on what you want to do. Becoming a healthy, free person is about turning off your negative voices, saying “No” to the negative people that control you, and saying “Yes” to your own authentic truth.

The feminine act of exploring your inner world will bring you great wisdom, peace and happiness. Peace with others and internal peace come about through your courageous acts of self-reflection rather than through blaming others. Self-knowledge, wisdom, happiness, freedom and solutions to your life challenges are the results of doing the feminine task of inner work.