Communicating Authentically

If you’ve read any of my former blog posts, it should be clear that I’m a feminist. But I also want to make clear that pro-women doesn’t mean anti-man, or anti-anyone. As a woman, married to a man, with a daughter and a son and family and friends of all genders, I think that seeking to build a world where we are all treated equally benefits everyone. To quote a meme:

Equal rights for me doesn’t mean fewer rights for you. It’s not pie.

And I don’t understand why it’s still necessary to make this argument.

Before the United States entered World War II, it seemed as though women were allowed to be smart, strong and savvy: think Myrna Loy in The Thin Man or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Having proven themselves as staunch and stoic holders of the homestead during the lean Depression era, they appeared to be overcoming the Victorian/Edwardian-era brand of “the weaker sex.”

During WWII, women went to work in factories, garages, offices, hospitals – wherever men used to rule the workplace, women stepped in to do their patriotic duty: rolling up their sleeves, they said, “We can do it!”

Then the bomb dropped and not all the men came home. Most of the ones who did were suffering from some form of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. Angry, exhausted, plagued with nightmares, some of them brain-injured from concussive shocks, all they wanted was to get back the lives they knew before. Women were ordered back into the home, and who were they to argue? These guys just fought a war. They needed care. We can do that, too.

So, that generation of American men were handled with kid gloves; cared for and soothed, as, I suppose, they should have been. Injuries to the mind and soul require as much care, if not more than, as any physical injury – and there were plenty of physical injuries, too.

But caregiver syndrome is a thing. When an injury heals, the patient should take increasing responsibility for their own care. If the injury doesn’t heal, the caregiver should be given some help so they can return to their own life, livelihood and self-care. If that doesn’t happen, the caregiver becomes an injured party too.

Not to discount the accomplishments of “the greatest generation,” but when it came to building a mentally and emotionally healthy and equitable society, let’s face it: they failed. They took a post-traumatic response to a horrific war and turned it into a religion, one which many American families keep striving to reach,80 years later, despite the fact that, like so many bad habits, it stopped serving its purpose generations ago.

Which brings me to the title of this blog. In my journey into the Tarot I came across the following quote:

“All magic, including sorcery, is the putting into practice of this: that the subtle rules the dense — force, matter; consciousness, force; and the suberconscious or divine, consciousness.”

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (author unknown)

In other words, the divine rules consciousness. Consciousness rules force. I take “consciousness” to mean our will or how we choose to direct our energy and attention. In other words, thought rules behavior. Force rules matter, meaning how we direct our energy is how we make things happen in the real world. Behavior yields results.

If we believe that outside forces cause our responses — that other people and events force us to behave a certain way — then we are powerless to change, to heal, or to grow. But there is a quote that perfectly describes the opposite state:

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Often attributed to either Viktor Frankl, Stephen Covey, or Rollo May

That space grants us a glimpse into our own consciousness. That glimpse allows us to be aware that we are thinking beings. When we can see that we are thinking, then we have the power to assess whether our thoughts are rational or not; and from there, choose how to respond. As we learn to master that practice, we see our choices become wiser and we begin manifesting better results.

That is magic, from tarot to spellwork to divination; crystal magic, candle magic, kitchen magic or green magic. Focusing your attention on what you want to manifest. From a scientific standpoint it is also mindfulness, meditation, and the underpinnings of cognitive behavior therapy. From a religious or spiritual space, it’s also prayer. In those spaces, we often recognize habits that may have helped us once but no longer serve us – and in fact, may be hurting us.

The religion of post-traumatic stress doesn’t want us to visit that space. It wants the dense to rule.

But the thing about the subtle is that the dense doesn’t understand it. The subtle will always rule, even if it allows the dense to think it’s in charge.

Seek the subtle. Seek the place between stimulus and response. Do the magic. Be the change you wish to see in the world. Have faith that someday, equality will prevail.

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