Ostara - Dancing Between Light And Darkness

My Limited Understanding Of Ostara

Today, some of my friends around the world celebrate the major Sabbat of Ostara, or the Spring Equinox. This is the time where the length of day and night is equal.  It’s an appropriate topic for the 2^nd Tarot Blog Hop for 2013.  However, I hadn’t the faintest clue what Ostara meant.  I had a good laugh when I remembered asking the Ostara Bloghop wrangler, Morgan Drake Eckstein http://gleamingsfromthedawn.blogspot.com/2013/03/between-light-and-darkness.html to be clearer with the topic although he tried very hard to explain that in the Northern hemisphere, people celebrated Spring and in the Southern hemisphere people celebrated Autumn.  I was thinking at that moment, “Oh dear, I am in Singapore, where we never have Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, it was just hot, hotter and hottest.” 

So one of my friends very kindly sent me a text to share how she celebrated Ostara with fresh spring flowers, hot cross buns and painted eggs.  The light bulb came on in my head immediately, “Oh! Like Easter!”  So for my lack of understanding about Ostara, please forgive me and do visit the blogpost of my fellow Tarot bloghop neighbour, Alison Cross at http://tarot-thrones.blogspot.com/2013/03/tarot-blog-hop-ostara-2013-snowdrop.html whose blog post on the same topic, was posted before mine.

From my limited knowledge about Ostara, I will share my perspectives about the significance of Ostara as a festival that celebrates the balance between light and darkness.  If you get even more confused about Ostara after this blog post, please visit the blogs of the rest of the wonderful Tarot bloggers in the master list at http://gleamingsfromthedawn.blogspot.com/2013/03/ostara-2013-tarot-blog-hop-master-list.html  for a clearer view on the topic

Dancing Between Darkness And Light

When Morgan themed this Tarot Blog Hop topic as “Dancing between Darkness and Light”, I thought immediately of how I had begun to understand the conflicts within me and the balance I have been attempting to create to harness the right energies of my light side while embracing the opportunities to learn from the negative energies of the dark side of my character.  I had discovered more about myself through an Astrology course I had signed up for with Christiane Hayes at www.cosmictarot.co.uk .  The course was possibly the most rewarding one I had ever done because I discovered how I could turn my challenges into opportunities, and my negative traits into a positive learning experience.  The course uncovered my internal struggles between the mix of fire and water elements governing my Sun and Moon signs.  

Interestingly, I have begun to make my Tarot readings with clients more robust with what I had learnt at this course, providing more advice-centric readings to them, with the aim of turning their challenges into opportunities too.

Sun Sign Zodiac And Persona Cards

As I was born on 1^st August 1969, my Sun sign zodiac card is Leo/Strength.  The character traits of my Sun sign are not unfamiliar to me.  I am self-confident, bold and have a big personality.  However, I can be aggressive, opinionated (I can’t help being right all the time) and arrogant at times (Like I said, I can't help being right all the time!) and quite persevering.

The Sun Sign persona card is the King of Wands.  I do like the bloke.  He’s charismatic, full of energy, a born leader but can be opinionated.  I need to harness the positive energies of this King more.

Moon Sign Zodiac And Persona Cards

My Moon sign zodiac card is Pisces/Moon, which uncovers my highly sensitive personality prone to displays of overly dramatic emotions (Should I go slit my wrist now?).  As a perfectionist, I always worry that everything around me isn’t perfect enough.  That usually motivates me to push myself to work harder, but it drives everyone around me crazy as well.  I do repress my true feelings, often showing my hard exterior but am actually a big, soft teddy bear inside. Christiane added that this trait helped with nurturing my intuitive nature which in turn, helped in my Tarot reading, I guess.

My Moon Sign persona card is the Knight of Cups.  I don’t like this bloke.  He’s such a lame softie. So here’s where it gets interesting when I assessed the fine balance I needed to create within myself. 

As the Knight of Cups, I am a dreamer; I am highly sensitive, sometimes insecure and often crave attention or recognition.  How could I have not seen that coming!  This was an eye-opener for me because I found bits of my shadow self creeping up on me.  I worked extremely hard, and put every passion into what I did.  However, I get thrown into the deep abyss of dejection that impacted my motivation, when I don’t get that requisite “pat on the back”.  The conflict of the fire elements in my Sun persona card of King of Wands and the Moon persona card of Knight of Cups have actually been a major issue plaguing my life. 

I always thought that I am a self-confident go-getter who was hard as nails.  However, I had never accepted my insecurities as a Tarot reader. Every Tarot reader out there seemed so much better, more knowledgeable and more experienced.  I often wore a hard exterior of stoicism but within me, I sometimes fill myself with doubt, questioning the science of Tarot and questioning my skills as a proficient Tarot reader.   When I re-read past postings of my blogs, I saw a trend with most of the postings spent wincing about not being taken seriously as a Tarot reader, or about arrogant Tarot readers who slapped me in the face with "So what you've got a CPTR from the TCBA? I've got 30 years of tarot reading experience under my belt." Yet within the same breath, I talked with great passion about my undying love for Tarot, the fulfilling mentoring work I do with my protégés and the relationship I have built with my clients.

Man, am I mixed up!

Charting My Shadow Cards

Interestingly, I then decided to chart the opposing sign on the zodiac wheel, opposite my Sun sign zodiac card of Leo/Strength/King of Wands and I encountered the Aquarius/Star/King of Swords cards.

Now I am intrigued.

When I tried to look at the negative influences of the Aquarius/Star/King of Swords combination of cards to learn something from it, these cards alluded to the fact that I am unbending, not willing to change, impractical, emotionally repressive and quite detached.

How true. With my insecurities, I am quite repressive and would never reveal how I truly felt when I am hurt, disappointed or afraid, yet I would be upfront and honest about most things.  I had an opinion about almost everything in fact.  I am also averse to changes, and tend to cling to my comfort zone, although my King of Wands personality meant that I am a dynamic person unafraid of challenges. 

I was very proud of how I have helped to make a positive impact to the lives of my clients through Tarot, yet often, I catch myself biting my lip when I am faced with skepticism from friends and acquaintances.  I then end up not giving Sun Goddess Tarot the full marketing effort it deserved.  Recognizing this helped stop me in my tracks when I unwittingly allowed the negative energy to get the better of me.

When I charted the opposing sign opposite the zodiac wheel from my Moon sign of Pisces/Moon/Knight of Cups, the Virgo/Hermit/Knight of Pentacles showed up.  Cool!  I see the opportunities of turning the negative influence of these cards around.  The pragmatic, cautious and diligent energies of the Virgo/Hermit/Knight of Pentacles cards are balancing the dreamy, highly sensitive and emotional traits of my Moon sign.

Getting To Know Myself Better

I would like to think that when this Tarot Astrology course fell on my lap, it was the Universe’s way of trying to tell me that I could help my clients better only when I knew myself better. 

Life, like Ostara, is a celebration of balance between yin and yang, positive and negative, light and darkness.  The universe throws us the mega challenge of this balancing act so that we can hone our skills to turn every challenge into an opportunity, and turn every opportunity into a reason to live life with joy and gratitude for the abundance that surrounds us.

If you don't already think that I am schizophrenic, I am grateful that you're interested in reading my perspective on Ostara.  Don't forget to visit the blogposts of my fellow Tarot blogging friends. The master list to their blogs was appended earlier within this blog post..

About The Writer:
The writer of this blog post is a marketeer by trade, and a tarot card reader by accident. She was awarded a Certified Professional Tarot Reader qualification from the Tarot Certification Board of America (TCBA) and was recently certified as a numerologist in Singapore. A member of the American Tarot Association (ATA) and the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI), she is also a reader for the Free Tarot Network and is a mentor for the ATA.   She can be contacted at www.facebook.com/SunGoddessTarot or www.sungoddesstarot.com

The Christmas Present

The Virtual Christmas Feast

Christmas is my favorite time of the year.  The food, parties, presents, decorations and general revelry aside, it is the time of the year when I can truly look back at everything that I had achieved throughout the year, and look forward to the coming New Year when I could celebrate more of the good, welcome the better, and say goodbye to the bad.

If you are familiar with the Tarot Blog Hop which I am honored to be a part of for some time now, you may have hopped onto my blog from Morgan's blogpost at http://gleamingsfromthedawn.blogspot.com/2012/12/splitting-timeline-tarot-blog-hop.html.   Perhaps you may be a regular reader of my blog or even an accidental visitor who chanced upon my blog.   However you have arrived at my blog, I am so happy that you are here to share the magic of Christmas with me.

As some of you may already know, this year had been a phenomenal year for me that involved my wading through a murky pool of challenges that included 3 surgeries and managing constant skepticism from family, friends and acquaintances about my love for Tarot, only to emerge the other side with new experiences, new gifts, and new perspectives.  I have come to associate these new experiences and new gifts collectively as a Christmas present from the Universe. 

To share this Christmas present with you, I would like to invite you to a virtual Christmas feast, imagining that you are all with me around a table filled with Christmas goodies.   I urge you to visualize this feast in your mind so that you may hold that energy together with me as I celebrate the return of light in my life, only made possible, because I have wholly embraced Tarot as my purpose to bring light to other people too.

The Meditation

To be a part of this virtual feast, it is advised that you start off with a short meditation.   If you are not familiar with the practice of meditation, I would like to invite you to close your eyes, and  take deep breaths, in and out, to the count of 7 for about 7 times.  Once you keep that steady pace of breathing, imagine a white light from the top of your head flowing down through your head, and into your body, through your limbs, down to your legs, out through your feet  and into the ground. As you are imagining the white light flowing through your body, let it take the negative energy away from you, pushing it out of your being and into the ground.  As the white light is doing this for you, imagine thereafter that a green light is flowing from the ground, up your feet, through your legs, into your body, and out through the crown of your head. Allow the green light to cleanse your being.  Keep your breaths at a steady pace as you “pattern” the flow of white and green lights through your body in different directions, intermingling to the point of creating a growing shroud of light around you. 

Now that you have created a protective shroud around your sacred space, imagine yourself walking up a cobbled path flanked by tall grass and huge trees, arching it's branches to touch each other, forming a shelter for you as you walk on.  Feel the breeze on your face, feel the ground at the bottom of your feet, and reach out to feel the tall grass flanking each side of the cobbled path.  Ahead of you is a bright yellow house.  It looks warm and welcoming, lined with beautiful flowers like poinsettias for the season just on the front porch.  The front door is opened, so just walk right in and walk across the room.  You’ll see  a huge table filled end to end with scrumptious food before you, and around that table, there are so many people, enjoying the revelry.  You can hear the chatter and laughter, the clinking of glasses and Christmas carols being played in the background.  Beside the table stands a noble fir tree decorated in beautiful gold and silver ornaments. You can smell the sweet scent of pine.

You’ve just arrived at my Christmas dinner.  Welcome.

The Staples

Every year, the staples of my Christmas dinner is the ubiquitous Roast Turkey and a bone-in Honey-baked Ham.  It just wouldn’t be a Christmas dinner without these staples.  Similarly, my transformation this year wouldn’t have been possible without Tarot and Meditation. It was only when I chose to further my esoteric studies and gotten myself professionally qualified with a certification and a diploma as a Tarot reader earlier this year, that I finally realized my  purpose of bringing light, clarity and assurance to the people around me through Tarot.  I took my Tarot reading to a new level.  Those cards weren’t just what I played with in the evenings for fun and excitement anymore.  They became my tool to provide clients with respite and provide my favorite charity, the Children’s Cancer Foundation, with additional support.

As I read for clients on a daily basis, I found that I had learnt new things about Tarot every day too.   The one thing I learnt was the ability to adapt and respond to situations with an opened mind and heart.  Tarot taught me this axiom – “If you cannot change the situation, then change the way you think about the situation.”  As I met with clients who had gone through so many challenges and adversities in the last year, sharing this axiom with them and validating it with the Tarot cards had helped them move forward from the negativity of these situations.  The most amazing thing about this was that in the process, I found that I had, in a similar fashion, healed myself from past hurts and disappointments too.

Another gift Tarot had brought me was my courage to set up my consultancy Sun Goddess Tarot.  It led me to greater fulfillment not only through the readings that I had done for my clients, but also through mentoring novice Tarot readers and also reading in support of charities.  From the initial success of Sun Goddess Tarot, I had decided a few months after, to launch my own line of goddess-inspired crystal healing jewelry called Sun Goddess Gems. This again, was inspired by requests from my clients, as after a tarot reading session,  I would give my clients a piece of crystal each, charged with the intent to protect and heal them.

The Turkey and Ham staples always came with the most robust gravies and sauces.  We usually have giblet gravy, cranberry sauce and apple sauce.  These were highly essential to round off my meats.  Similarly, over the year, daily meditations were essential to me.   I wouldn’t have been able to manage the many client appointments, difficult situations that my clients typically went through, the multiple commitments and projects that I was involved in without grounding and centering myself.  I love meditating to the sunrise.  Meditation had been such a cornerstone of my life that I practically could not function without it.  It has made me a better Tarot reader.  In fact, it has made me a better, more grounded person.

The Sides

The side dishes are an important pairing to the Turkey and the Ham.  The fun is always in spending a couple of months before Christmas, agonizing about what side dishes to prepare and it always ends off with an animated argument with the hubby about the role of brussel sprouts at the dinner.  This year, I wanted my side dishes to be meaningful and bear some significance to what my family brings to the table.  The hubby has decided to whip up a Sage and Onion stuffing based on his late mother’s recipe.  As an Asian, I thought to add a twist to my Christmas dinner with an Asian noodle salad.  And because my hubby’s and my health took a toll this year with him being diagnosed for diabetes and myself having had to undergo a breast and a knee surgery, we decided to have roasted rosemary potatoes too as a symbol of our journeying towards better health next year.  I love rosemary as a herb.  It has such fantastic health-giving properties.  Do you know that in the olden days, Roman priests used rosemary  as incense in religious ceremonies and in England, sprigs of rosemary was put on top of the coffin before  the grave was filled with dirt?  Also, rosemary is very good for protecting against negative energy. 

Just like the side dishes that paired harmoniously to my main dishes at the Christmas dinner, there is one huge creative project which I had embarked on this year, to support my main pillars of growth – Tarot and Meditation.  Due to my ardent belief in the healing properties of crystals, I launched my goddess-inspired line of crystal jewelry called Sun Goddess Gems.  I have always loved crystals.  However, when I started giving away crystals to my clients after their tarot reading sessions, I had been getting so much positive feedback about how the crystals had helped them remove negative energy and move forward from their respective situations or issues. 

In fact, crystals are such a big part of my life that it figures prominently in my prayer rituals.  As you know, Yule is a celebration of rebirth or renewal as we welcome the sun back into our lives.  So in my prayer ritual this Christmas, as I remember the past year, I celebrate joy, abundance and prosperity in the coming year with a crystal grid created from green aventurine, moss agate, citrine, tiger’s eye and clear quartz. A picture of this crystal grid is posted below this blog.

The Christmas Present

As my Christmas present to one of my guests at this virtual Christmas dinner, I will be giving away a beautiful piece of raw citrine pendant, newly created for Sun Goddess Gems.  This pendant is artisan wire-wrapped in gold-plated wire.  I will be giving away this pendant to a randomly picked reader of this blog post who has added this blog http://sungoddesstarot.blogspot.com into his or her blogroll and who have written a comment to this post by Boxing day on 26th Dec 2012, and I will be announcing the winner of this beauty on my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/SunGoddessTarot.  Citrine enhances energy, cleanses the solar plexus, sacral and crown chakras and attracts wealth, prosperity and success.  I have named this citrine pendant Lakshmi, after the Hindu Goddess of wealth and success.  A picture of this pendant is appended below this blogpost.

The Dessert

Okay, let’s get this straight. I can cook but I can’t bake. Desserts are my biggest headache every year, at every festive occasion.  Often, I would specially order the dessert from a shop, beg a guest to bring a cake or get the hubby to make one of his less-than-perfect banoffee pies.   This year however, as it is my year of “rebirth”, I just had to create something from scratch.  Anything handmade would be appreciated, I thought.  So I will be personally baking my own mince pies and I will whip up a special Christmas trifle.  Not to be outdone, the hubby is currently figuring out how to make a Christmas pudding.  Thank goodness, it will be awhile before he figures out that the pudding that he makes this year, will need to be cured and consumed at next Christmas.  I’ll think of a plan for discreet disposal next year then.

Meanwhile, as part of my intention to imbibe this Christmas with some creative spirit, I hand-crafted my Sun candle with cinnamon, star anise, dried flowers and herbs and infused it with an abundance anointing oil.   I will burn this candle throughout the night of Christmas as a symbol of welcoming the sun back.  A picture of my candle is posted below this blog.  If you hear someone grumbling amidst the wonderful smell of cinnamon and other herbs, it’s the hubby nagging me about leaving a naked light unattended in the house. 

How could the candle be left unattended when we are partying all through the night into the morning.  Right!?

The Farewell

When the sun rises the next morning after my Christmas party, it’s time for us to bid each other farewell with wishes of good health and prosperity into the New Year.  Before you leave, I have one more Christmas present for you.  I picked one of my favorite tarot cards and meditated upon it, sending blessings along your way from the card.  I picked the Star.  The Star promises new hope, positivity, impending success and new possibilities.  Open your heart and mind to new ideas and opportunities to grow.   Treat new experiences as the Universe’s way of guiding you up the path towards successfully attaining your goals.

I reached out to touch my Star this year.  So my Christmas wish for you is that you’ll touch yours too. Thank you for raising the energy with me at this virtual Christmas feast.  Don’t forget to ground yourself again through meditation to bring the energy down as you leave my home.  Also, don’t end your Christmas celebrations there.  I would like to invite you to read the post of my fellow Tarot Bloghopper Maureen at http://tarotwitchery.blogspot.com/2012/12/tarot-blog-hop-yule-2012-christmas-is.html.  And if you do experience a broken link, you may return to the master list for this Tarot Blog Hop at http://tarot-thrones.blogspot.co.uk/p/yule-blog-hop-master-list-2012.html.

About The Writer:

The writer of this blog post is a marketeer by trade, and a tarot card reader by accident. She was awarded a Certified Professional Tarot Reader qualification from the Tarot Certification Board of America (TCBA) and was recently certified as a numerologist in Singapore. A member of the American Tarot Association (ATA) and the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI), she is also a reader for the Free Tarot Network and is a mentor for the ATA.  

She can be contacted at www.facebook.com/SunGoddessTarot or www.sungoddesstarot.com

The Ash Family Christmas Tree - Our first real Noble Fir tree

Meditation to Manifest the Intention Of Abundance

Nut, Egyptian Goddess of the Sky Depicted in the Star Card from Wizards Tarot

Hand-decorated Sun Candle to Welcome Back The Sun At The Winter Solstice

Prosperity and Abundance Crystal Grid for Yule

Laksmi -Raw Citrine Pendant from Sun Goddess Gems