Cards for the Day: 2 of Pentacles/R’d Queen of Pentacles/8 of Cups: You are getting very sleepy…

Though I usually draw two cards for the day, three jumped out at me today: the Two of Pentacles, reversed Queen of Pentacles, and Eight of Chalices. These cards are about balance and shifting priorities, but also about shifting energy in the physical body, and about our shifting focus.

We’d like to think that our productivity is a function of how much we push ourselves: how fast and how hard we work, and for how long. But it isn’t. We could drink buckets of coffee or take whatever other stimulants are in our personal arsenal, burn the candle at both ends, and work 18-hour days, and still not manage to accomplish the things we need to do. And then, having not accomplished those things, we could push even harder, and accomplish still less. If we choose this path, this is precisely what will happen.

To have energy to get work done, we have to take into account the spiraling and centripetal nature of energy. By spiraling, I mean that each push requires an opposite period of time in which we recover. By centripetal, I mean that we have to take the time to draw our energy in first, before we can push it out (another kind of spiral, actually).

These cards, today, suggest that we are juggling many priorities, constantly shifting our focus between work and family, and it is imperative, in the midst of this, that we take time to rest and recover. Because the truth is that when we rest, the seed of our new energy within us will start to grow, like the Kundalini serpentine energy on the Two of Pentacles card. During sleep, the energy to get up and go about our work slowly rises in us, until it reaches a point where it is ready to burst into fruition — and then we wake up. Think of the yang within the yin, in the yin-yang symbol. That burning, get-things-done, active yang energy is there even in the dormant yin energy of rest and sleep. Ultimately, it takes yin energy to nurture that yang energy — otherwise it will burn out. Today, we might need extra yin. Actually, whether we need/want that extra yin or not, it’s here and it’s making us sleepy. Will you react to that yin energy by drinking an extra cup of coffee (pushing harder and further depleting your yang), or will you nurture that yang energy with a nap?

Added to the mix today, and wearing us out even further, is our Eight of Chalices energy (in the Yoga Tarot, the Eight of Chalices is connected with old emotions re-emerging). Mercury retrograde is still pulling those old emotions out of us and up into our consciousness. That’s making us tired too, but we have to work through these things. Take time for peace and quiet and solitude, if you can.