Card of the Day: Eight of Swords
Mary K. Greer calls this the “Houdini card.” I love that. What looks to be an impossible situation...somehow he gets free! How does he do that!? I don’t actually know! In the traditional Rider-Waite Smith depiction of this card, a woman stands blindfolded, arms bound to her body, surrounded by swords. But she’s not actually trapped; her legs and feet are free. She can just walk away.
This butterfly isn’t trapped either. As she breaks out, she’ll find her “feet” and wings using her cocoon as a perch before taking flight. The swords don’t actually pose any real danger. They do, however, represent our mental mishegoss. Our mind can produce emotions that are far scarier than anything we might encounter in real life. Go ahead, try it right now: bring to mind a situation that scares the shit out of you and see how your whole bodily system follows suit.
After 15 years of training my mind in meditation, I am more humbled than ever by my habit of getting carried away by stories and scenarios purely of my mind’s creation. How much of my life have I spent stirred up with anxiety and other distressing feelings that bear no connection to what’s actually happening? It’s hard (shameful?) to admit this. And: how much worse off would I be if I hadn’t spent all those years working with my mind?!
A magician does her work by directing the audience’s attention. Everything is happening in plain sight, but her mastery lies in making everyone pay attention to one thing at the expense of another. Foregrounding the illusion and melting the “trick” into the background. This is the magic of our own mind, too. Hojin Sensei often says this when she offers meditation instruction: “The power of the mind is that it can travel to any place, to any time--past, present and future.” That is quite a trick. The biggest trick of all, though, is placing the mind on this moment. And grace is remembering that every moment presents a fresh opportunity to this.
