KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

January 10 through January 16, 2022

Mercury will be going retrograde in Aquarius on Friday, but we can expect to see evidence of it as early as Monday. Miscommunication, lost items and internet glitches could litter the week, so stay on alert and when one door closes, look for a different avenue to get to where you're going. The Moon marches through grounded Taurus Monday through Wednesday, which should add a lot of stability to our movements the first half of the week; if there's anything you just have to get one, try to get it off your plate before Thursday! The Moon will hang out in Gemini Thursday and Friday, and with Gemini's ruler Mercury changing direction, this could be the time when miscommunication is at it's highest; if your phone isn't working quite right or your texts disappear, don't be surprised! Avoid making any set in stone decisions for the next three weeks, as changing your mind at the last minute will be a theme. We'd be wise to lay low and stick close to home over the weekend as the Moon travels through Cancer, stoking the home fires and attending to our closest relationships.

Using the Tarot to Understand Your Self and Your Divinity, by Sasha Graham

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

You are the universe. You are divine. You are pure consciousness. Everything you see, notice, observe, listen to, eat, laugh at, make fun of, enjoy and dislike, resist and surrender to is the universe seeing itself, understanding itself, and recognizing itself. What is true for you is true for the universe. What is true for the universe is true for you. As above, so below. This is why when you give love, you receive love.

You, like the Fool tarot card, are on a journey, quest, adventure. The journey of who you are, like a sacred circle, will lead you back yourself. The World circles back to the Fool card and begins the journey again. Your journey begins with you. It ends with you. You may travel to the edges of your backyard or to the far flung reaches of the world. It is the internal journey that matters. Everything else? Shadows and dust. The exterior world is energy changing form, a mere illusion. Your interior life, your inner roads, bear the mark of eternity.

Each day as you wake, the mystery of who you are unfolds a bit further. You move forward, backwards, or sideways on your respective path, closer to or further from your goals. You speed along on cruise control sometimes. Other times, you find yourself lost in thorny thickets or gasping for air in quicksand. We all instigate cause and effect with our actions and deeds. We fill the world with our energy. We spend it wisely on things we love, reinvesting energy in ourselves or give it away to other people and things. Each day of our life, we step closer to death. August's rich harvest and golden light surrenders into the deepening shadows of September's equinox. It is worth surrendering to. It isn't easy, but its beautiful. It is why we are here. Practice the art of surrender. If you let Summer's passage into Fall be your teacher, you become more of who you are outside of linear time.

A map is essential for any journey. These days, we use handy cell phone maps fitting snugly into the palm of our traveling hands. If you were around in the 1970s you'll remember giant AAA travel maps found under vinyl seats and in the dusty glove compartments of our parents' car. These maps became reading fodder during infernal road trips after the Mad Libs and fast food fries gave out. Ancient peoples crafted scroll maps by hand. Men and women looked to the firmament before paper's invention. Constellations in a crystal clear, pollution-free night sky were used as a guide, plot, and plan.

Maps show us landscapes; they reveal the lay of the land so we can orient ourselves. Maps let us know where to find things like gas stations, convenience stores, and our friend's house. Yet, the most most exciting maps, the most rarified, desired, and lusted for maps, maps that people have shed blood and lost their lives over, are treasure maps. If you are looking for the treasure map of your soul, look no further than a deck of Tarot cards for sale at your local bookshop.

Tarot has been described as many things; an oracle, game, book, meditation and contemplative device, and more. Tarot is the ideal map because it presents you, the inner and outer life, in a sensible, precise, easy to read manner. It speaks with equal equity of the practical and the mysterious, the visible and invisible. The tarot, like you, is the microcosm and macrocosm. Tarot offers possibility while reflecting precisely where you are on your journey. Tarot reflects infinite possibility because it communicates through symbol. Each of us fill symbols and cards with personal meaning, the way we read between the lines of poetry or prose. Poetry speaks through economy of words and silence. Silence, like dark matter or garden compost, contains all possibility. Tarot's symbols communicate like poetry because symbolic meaning is felt. Visuals are ingested and move inside of us to take residence. They are ripe with wide open space. You illuminate the space with personal meaning.

My latest book, Llewellyn's Complete Book of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, offers a keen examination of the occult mapping of tarot. I put aside personal associations with the cards aside and went straight to Arthur Waite, the author and source of the RWS deck, to craft a book on the world's most famous deck. I deconstructed his books and articles relating to the cards to understand his ultimate goal when creating the deck in 1909. Turns out, Waite was using the tarot as a mapping tool to express the nature of divinity.

The nature of divinity was the last thing I was looking for when buying my first deck of tarot cards at age twelve.  Delicious, mysterious Halloween was all I could sense inside the cards. Black and orange jelly beans, bobbing for apples, witches with pointy hats and sugary orange pumpkins carved into silly and macabre faces. I wouldn't have understood the phrase "nature of divinity" as a pre-teen. I did, however, hop off my bike often to lie back on a field. I enjoyed feeling myself tiny against an expansive summer sky or seeing luminous fall foliage flush through valleys blazing with color. It was a signature of things to come.

Nature is the great equalizer of humanity. We all gaze at the same moon. No matter how we come to understand our existence, regardless of dogma, religion, system or rejection of systems used to explain our souls, life and the after-life, nature is the equalizer. The ocean remains the ocean. A mountain is a mountain. A flower is a flower. Nature contains the first archetypes. Nature predates human personality. This is why myth and legend are elemental and grounded in mountains, sky, and ocean. Earth, air, fire, and water are reflected in tarot as Pentacles, Swords, Wands, and Cups. These are the symbolic elements we fill to the brim with personal meaning.

The material world (Pentacles) is the place where we all meet each other while navigating the folds of our interior life. The earth contains everything you can touch, taste, see, feel, and smell. Pentacles are your soft body, your tasty dinner, your little black dress, the money you stuff in your wallet, your bedroom, your garden, etc. Everything else in the tarot and in our life is invisible. We experience and feel the passion of Wands when we desire a person or thing. We see Wands expressed in others through facial expressions and actions yet we are unable to hold passion in our hands. We experience the intellectuality of Swords, articulate ourselves through language, make calculations and see others doing the same yet we cannot taste or smell a thought itself. The emotional life of Cups often influences our every action. Our emotions can feel wonderful or horrifying yet you can’t literally hold love, fear, excitement, trepidation in your hands.

Major Arcana archetypes are psychological constructs and ideas that are not available in solid form. We cycle through the archetypes and court card personalities on a daily basis. Court cards and archetypes reflect all of the different personalities living inside of you. You are a tarot Queen when in an empathetic state of mind and nurturing others. You are the Empress when at the height of your creative ability and being brilliant with your talents. You are the Emperor when you make routines and rules for yourself and stick to them. You are a Page when you are in a childlike and curious mood. We cycle through personalities, moods, and archetypes differently each day and on a moment to moment basis. Yet it is all invisible and ephemeral. The experience of our life occurs inside of us.

Your response to spirituality, the supernatural, creativity, etc., is interior and highly personal. No two people experience mystery in the same way. C.S Lewis said, "Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even at best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for and listening for?"

Arthur Waite offers us a map of how divinity (the universal life force, the godhead, a flower, whatever name you'd like to give it) unfolds in the material world via the tarot by connecting it with the Tree of Life. Once divinity moves down through the Tree and expresses itself in the material world, like a sunflower blooming in your garden, you are free to retrace these steps in reverse. You can moves back up the Tree, retracing the path of divinity. You reach the summit to look it squarely in the eye. Divinity sees you seeing it. Divinity wants you to recognize it as much as your soul wants to be seen and understood.

Have you ever fallen in love with a person or animal and felt them loving you back? It is the soul recognition in another. It usually happens when you least expected it, although you always desired it. Divinity's been on Tinder looking for you all along. This is why love, especially new love, fills us with endorphin-like drug feelings. It is a hint, a gasp of the ecstatic love which created you. Once you truly "see" each other and recognize one another, like a lover's kiss, a Big Bang explodes.

Your Big Bang expresses itself though synchronicities and evolution in the material world. Uncanny synchronicity appears to let us know we chose well. We are right where we should be on our path, journey, adventure. You change on a cellular level. The material world changes with you. You find yourself responding to old habits and behaviors in a different way. Patterns change. Old challenges are with met with sudden clarity and solutions. You become more of who you are. The mystery of who you are unfolds.

The seeds of everything you are, everything you need, is right there. Just as the Magician has Cups, Wands, Swords and Pentacles on his table, your psyche, spirit, passions, and body is a self-sustaining kit with everything you need. I hope you tend to the garden of your soul. I hope you make use of the gifts enfolded and entrusted deep inside of you. May your gifts bring you joy. You make the world a more beautiful place by sharing them. I hope you stay true to your path. Hope you are willing to brave dark woods and creepy shadows when the going gets tough. Persevere through to claim the glittering treasure beyond. May you cycle through the tarot a million times over and find your deepest authenticity in every draw. All the universe is planted inside of you.

It's harvest time.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2018. All rights reserved.

Three years ago, I caught my husband with his secretary in bed in my house. It was devastating for me because my husband generally looks down on people who flirt and have extra marital affairs. I was so shocked that I had no words to express my hurt and anger. Though the woman was married, I didn't inform her husband, as I didn't want to jeopardize her marriage. Both of them requested forgiveness, and I said, Since I love my God, I have to forgive, especially since both of you are feeling remorseful about it. The ordeal didn't end for me, however. I started having dreams that this woman is making fun of me and that I am slapping her. I thought I had forgotten the incident, but dreams keep recurring and making me sad. In my dreams I am hurting her, but at the same time I am crying. I want to forget it, but I've been unable to. I feel I am the one who is suffering, while my husband and this woman seem to be fine. How can I get rid of this pain?
Anita

Dreamchaser:

You write that you have forgiven because you love God and have to forgive, but you have NOT forgiven. Not only have you not forgiven, it continues to get worse. You do not trust your husband, and you pretty much hate this woman.

Christian forgiveness is NOT synonymous with meekness and mildness. I have no idea where that idea came from and why women in your position react this way so often. Nowhere is it written that you have to instantly say I forgive you and then forget it. That is just not practical. True forgiveness is often something that takes years to achieve. For example, it has taken me over four years of hard work to get to the place where I can forgive one particular person for something that he did to me. If I was in your situation, I would still be working on that whole forgiveness thing, as would MANY women.

Yes, we're wise to forgive people for wrongs they did to us, but that person must also be held accountable for their actions. In the world you live in, things get swept under the carpet and no one is made to assume responsibility for their actions. You did not want to jeopardize her marriage? She did that herself by sleeping with your husband in YOUR bed. You made her completely unaccountable for her actions by not informing her husband about what happened. It is because she skipped merrily on her way that you are plagued by dreams of hurting her.

Another essential part of this equation is self-protection. To incorporate this, you may have to say, I forgive you for what you did to me, but I will never allow you another chance to do the same thing EVER again. You have to consider how you can apply that in your situation.

You need counseling, and you need it asap. You need individual counseling and you also need marriage counseling. Your husband does not have sex with another woman in your bed if your marriage is solid. By using your method of forgiving, you put the affair behind you and moved forward in your lives without addressing the original problems that caused him to bring another woman into your bed in the first place. If the problems are not addressed and fixed, he will cheat again, and you will suffer again.

You must find a good therapist so that you can deal with the anger, frustration, fear, doubt, and loathing that you have for your husband, this woman, and your life now. You also have to work to get back to a place where you can once again trust him - or any man for that matter. The bottom line is that you have not truly forgiven either of them. Go get some therapy. Fix yourself so you can be happy. You deserve it. I wish you PEACE in your soul.

*****

Astrea:

I want to take this opportunity to explain that Scorpios have an undeserved reputation for being unfaithful. While the really bad ones may use that as an excuse to stray, in my experience, Scorpios are overall a very tender group. When a Scorpio really loves someone, there is no one who is a more dedicated and faithful partner. Sometimes they even carry that to obsession and possessiveness, which can make their partner feel smothered. As with every sign, there are a few bad apples, but overall, Scorpios are faithful and stable in relationships when they're happy.

Scorpios also have an awful time when they try to sneak around, and are most often caught at the WORST possible moments in their lives. You caught your husband in your own home; I see that as a cry for help. Scorpios take things to extremes sometimes. He must have wanted you to catch him so that he could get out of the affair or begin to fix whatever was missing in your marriage.

The dreams you're having are no mystery. Even though you would love to punish that woman for the pain she's caused you, it would hurt your Spirit to do that in real life. That's why you cry as you slap her in your dream. Your conscious mind knows that it wouldn't do any good to punish HER, because it's your HUSBAND who chose to cheat. Your subconscious has picked her for you to be slapping in your dream because you really don't want to confront your husband any more about this nasty situation. Even though you have forgiven him, somewhere deep inside you, it's natural to feel that both of these people should pay for what they did to you.

Whether those two are suffering or not, you sure are! Meditation can help with that, but a professional therapist would be much better for dealing with and working through this awful event. Because you're still with your husband, it will take you longer to be at peace with this situation. You were really and truly a victim here, and nothing is going to change that.

Many people could never forgive that kind of betrayal. Because of your close relationship with God, you were able to forgive your husband and keep your marriage together. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart for minding your own business and not involving yourself with your husband's secretary's marriage. That would have hurt you even more.

She and her husband have problems of their own to work through - if they can. Staying out of that saved you much grief. That was a smart Virgo thing to do for sure! One of Virgo's best qualities is the ability to zero in on personal problems and leave everyone else alone to solve theirs in their own way. That focus is probably what saved your marriage.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.