Cards for the Day: reversed Compassion/Abundance: Heal Anxious Energy and Nervous Tension with Breath and Affirmations

It’s been a long time since I drew from the Universal Wisdom deck by Toni Carmine Salerno. Today we have Compassion, reversed, and Abundance. In this deck, Compassion really means self-compassion. And Abundance refers to a feeling that something is lacking in our lives. Awww…this day was made for the words, “don’t be so hard on yourself.” It’s a day of anxiety, worrying, and generally feeling nervous about things. Pay special attention to your own thoughts and self-talk (there is a lot of throat chakra blue in this card–and yes, it still counts as talking even if you are talking to yourself). Many of us are kind to others and kind in the words we use with others, but still remain intensely self-critical. Whatever we are worried about, we figure it’s our own fault! Affirmations are a good way to try to change the habit of thinking judgmentally and assigning blame and guilt — even though many of us feel very silly trying affirmations for the first time. I don’t usually include affirmations in this blog, but I feel moved to  today, so here are two:

This is my precious life.

This moment will never return.

Why am I suggesting these two affirmations rather than something along the lines of “I am so great”? Wouldn’t that be better for self-esteem? Well, maybe, but what I see here is that we are being hard on ourselves over the feeling that we are missing something: enough time, enough money, maybe enough comfort. The antidote to this is to return to an appreciation of the present moment. We have far more than we realize, in this moment. We are alive, and the clock is ticking. We don’t know how many moments of our life we have left, but this is one of them, and therefore precious, regardless of present circumstances that we may find difficult or adverse. And regardless of the many ways in which we feel we may have screwed up.

Note that the Abundance card comes with an angel! We always have angels and bodhisattvas watching over us. We are never as alone as we think we are.

In addition to the affirmations that I’ve suggested for today, there is also a visualization that I feel might help. I have been thinking of air as a healing substance lately. It’s the world’s most frugal healer, always available and amazingly effective. Coincidentally, as I was thinking along these lines already, I then heard James Finley say (in the audiobook Transforming Trauma, which I’m listening to), that in his first enlightenment experience, he had the epiphany that air is God, and that when we breathe, we breathe in God. When I heard that, I thought, yes — that’s exactly it. This is not a fantasy or an imaginative exercise, but a way of improving our awareness of reality. Think that as you breathe in, you are breathing in healing energy (because I do reiki, I think of it as reiki energy). On the out breath, that healing energy flows toward every part of your body and also into your aura, healing what needs to be healed, releasing what needs to be released, and also protecting you from negative vibrations and the negative energy that might be around you. Breathe for seconds or minutes, wherever you might happen to be. Breathe in appreciation for the perfection of this moment and the perfection of who you are in this moment. Is this gushy self-indulgent tripe? No. It’s a technique for marrying faith with love with mindfulness to create a powerful healing experience.