words affect thoughts.

Maturity from Osho Zen tarot, http://www.osho.com/






IN wanting to 'catch' my thoughts as they pass through, and 'tweak' them so that any with 'negative' spin get - re-spun? so that they are warm and fuzzy instead of cold and prickly -

I've become *really* aware of every slightest possible negative nuance of everything I hear and read and think.

Sometimes I discover it's an interpretation the speaker or writer didn't intend; in which case, it's easier to let it go.

But there seems to be an underlying habit of judgment in our culture (maybe all cultures?) and it seems to me that it's high time to learn to do things differently.

I keep thinking of the line from Hamlet, "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." (emphasis mine).

***
The thing is, nothing is *intrinsically* bad - the death of the wildebeest is bad for her and her dependents; but for the lion who eats her? It's good! No more hungry lion, at least for today.

And it's *all* like that - it's all a matter of perspective, of where you're standing when you tell the story, as to what spin you are able to give it.

The trick with *humans* is that we *depend* on each other and are tribal, story-telling creatures who make sense of our Universe by how we *describe* it as much as, if not more than, by our actual, physical, tangible experience of it.

So: Words matter!

So this Tarot thing, and the I Ching thing ( :-) are ways to 're-frame' my thinking, to give me 'positive' ways to look at and think about things, to help me move forward in my life.

Like seeing 'mess' and 'chaos' (which, at least to *me*, are words that tend to have 'negative' connotations) instead as 'fertile breeding grounds' for something new to grow - kind of like compost: That big, messy, often smelly, wormy mass of black muck can produce the most *gorgeous* blooms you've ever seen on your roses or what have you.

So.

The cards help me 'pull up' to the surface what I'm thinking and feeling, and give 'names' to those things, and from there, to *recognize* so-called 'negative' patterns, and help myself 'spin' them to something more positive.

For example, in a couple of recent 'readings', I pulled the King of Wands card several times in a row, and the particular deck I was looking at had a negative, nasty interpretation that I didn't like. So I hunted around til I found a better one.

:-)

An image from http://lynnehoppe.blogspot.com/ which seems apropos because the title is 'only a non-ambitious [person] can remain in the present':