“Deal with what’s presently real; also deal with what you believe to be real”

from my journal this morning

 

Just because something is an illusion, doesn’t make the loss any less painful. In fact, the death of illusion can be even more difficult to process than the physical thing.

 

Today’s card is the 9 of Swords.

What first struck me about this card was the image of grief, and then the illusion of suffering.

I want to be clear – all suffering is real, especially suffering we feel for our illusions.

Illusions are perhaps the hardest kind of loss because we lose something we have created ourselves.

 

Illusions come from a place deep down in our subconscious. They come from a mix of our animal needs, and our egoic desires (by egoic, I mean the part of us that serves our perception of ourselves to the outside world).

Illusions are very very important to us. They are a way we create safety. They can be an expression of creativity.

Illusions in themselves are not harmful nor dangerous.

The challenge arrives when we forget where they came from, how they were created, and their underlying purpose, and we believe that they are reality. Now this especially becomes problematic when reality does not match our perception/illusion.

This is when the “shoulds” come out. I like to think of this as “arguing with reality” as per The Work of Byron Katie.

 

Here’s where the struggle comes in. We suffer because our illusion doesn’t match reality, and so we argue and argue about what’s here and now and real and in front of us. But accepting what’s real means we have to kill what we’ve created. Here in lies the problem.

You may have heard the term “egoic death” in spiritual circles, or perhaps Buddhist concepts.

Essentially, it is killing our investment in believing the illusion we’ve created. We think it’s real, therefore, it is. It might not be real to the rest of the world, but our illusions are very much real. They are our babies – our creations. We created them to serve a very important purpose.

Some of them, we’ve internalized from our families, society, our culture. Those can be especially tricky. When we internalize an illusion, part of it is not ours, but another part very much is. This distancing allows us to be separate from the thing and not really fully take responsibility and ownership of our participation of the thing.

An example of this is how, in my culture and the culture I live in, it is often women who perpetuate harmful patriarchal structures, behaviours, and patterns – often without realizing it. It is the internalized illusion of both feminine and patriarchal expression that can have us completely blinded by how it unfolds in the day to day “real world” lived experience.

I’m not going to get deep into this right now, but hopefully will post some links and resources in the near future because it is on its own a massive topic.

 

Back to killing off my illusions.

 

Here’s the thing. The word “illusion” in its very nature is a bit deceiving. It means “not real”, however to our ego, and our sense of security in self, it very much is real. So it deserves a real death, a real funeral, and of course, a real grieving process.

 

The 9 of Swords danced into my day this morning bringing messages of my own illusions in the form of worry. In the Light Seer’s Tarot guidebook, it asks refers to “worry about the future”. It asks me “What’s keeping you up at night?”

 

A really huge internalized illusion for me, one I’ve been hearing for most of my childhood, is that I’m not capable of taking care of myself. That no matter how hard I try to create I life for myself, I will always be dependant on my mommy because she knows what’s best for me.

This is a really unhealthy dynamic I’ve internalized from my childhood that for me can often express itself as an underlying fear: fear that I’m failing or not good enough, fear that I’ll be forced to go back to the toxic co-dependant dynamic that was my foundational experience with attachment as an infant, child, adolescent.

 

I can try to ignore this fear (as I often do), but it’s still there. It lives within be because although the words and beliefs that formed the fear were not my own, the process of internalization has created a permanent home in my being for them. So within me, then live.

Partly illusion, and partly truth. Interestingly enough, as I wrote out these fears and beliefs in my journal this morning, gave them love and compassion, and the allowance to exist and be seen, something happened.

A kind of clarity pierced through. This clarity, my soul essence – me, my truth, and I – was able to see the truth in my belief but also the lie in it. This belief that I’ve “failed to provide for, nurture, and protect myself in the big bad world” clearly comes from my mom’s own victimization and manipulation that part of me believes to be true, yet another part of me knows that it could never be true.

When I take responsibility in my ownership, in my part, the part I hold internally in my own being, I realize the truth. No one can ever be the authority in what I need and what’s best for me except me.

That is a truth I hold so deeply in my bones it is unshakable.

 

“Only my soul knows what’s for me and what’s not. If I ask my soul if she’s ready to be in relationship with my emotionally abusive caregiver, the answer is a clear no. That means she has a plan for me. A plan that is designed from intelligence, from nurturance – a plan that is designed perfectly for me.”

from my journal this morning

 

What if we could hold our illusions from this place of internal knowing?

What is we could be in such deep relationship to our knowing that our trust is absolutely unshakable?

 

This morning as I wrote out my fears, spoke to my illusions, and let it be held from my own unshakable knowing, I feel deeply grateful. Grateful to be reminded that it’s ok to grieve what is real, and what is not. That my fears don’t mean certain outcome, and that she is always there to nurture me, nourish me, and remind me what is uniquely for me.