The Empowerment of Your Own Wisdom
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on August 13th, 2010 | 7 Comments »
I led a nature divination workshop in the University of Wisconsin Arboretum a few years ago. I asked the group first to ground and center, then remind themselves of their oracular question, and then simply look around at the marshland where we had gathered. One woman decided to ask two questions rather than just one.
She stationed herself on a boardwalk overlooking the marsh, closed her eyes and asked: “How can I find the time and energy to enjoy my life, given the fact that I am extremely busy with work right now?” When she opened her eyes, she immediately noticed the swaying grasses and rushes in front of her and realized that she, too, could be flexible like these plants. She could go with the flow and fit pleasure into the small cracks in her work life.
Then she closed her eyes again and asked: “What should I do about my nephew?” Opening her eyes on the same scene less than a minute later, she noticed a large tree in the middle distance that appeared sturdy and deeply-rooted. Yes, she thought to herself, I could provide this teenager with the kind of stability this tree represents if I open my home to him.
My student’s experience exhibits the extent to which her insight depended on her own perception. Because she was looking for different types of feedback, at the same place and at almost the same time, she noticed two very different images.
To see more divination cards, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.
This is exactly the type of experience I wanted to foster when several years ago I proposed a project to my daughter, the painter Linnea Vedder. My idea was a deck of divination cards that helps people access their own insight. Linnea illustrated the cards and I wrote the accompanying book. We call it The World Is Your Oracle.
My desire was to encourage people to rely more on their own inner wisdom and less on the “expertise” of authority figures in their lives, whether it was a TV newsperson or a professor in their classroom. Teaching Women’s Studies, I had discovered how important a woman’s intuition could be. Several of my students had told me stories that ended with the refrain, “If I had just listened to my intuition, I might not have been raped.” As a long-time feminist and lefty, I also realized the importance of listening to our own truths in other contexts as well. The received wisdom of our culture is often tainted by perspectives that oppose our best interests.
Putting these two insights together, I recognized that divination could benefit us powerfully. This will only make sense to you if you realize that I define divination not as fortune telling or predicting the future — but as the active use of our intuition, employing a variety of methods for getting in touch with our inner knowing.
What I’ve found over the years is that using oracular techniques helps free up the unconscious layers of our mind and broaden our sense of perception. Scientists used to think that the unconscious was just the dumb cousin of our conscious awareness, driving most of the time on autopilot. They assumed the brain processed thought in a deliberate, analytical fashion – i.e. with conscious awareness. But recent research has shown that the unconscious mind actually does much of the brain’s work. While it’s true that the unconscious stores our automatic processes (like riding a bike), it also sorts through most of the information we receive and converts it into a complex web of facts and emotion.
Perceptions register in the unconcious mind before they appear in our conscious awareness. For that reason, the unconscious mind constantly monitors both our external and internal environment. When it judges the information gathered to be important enough, we become consciously aware of something. Oracles position us ahead of the game by putting us in touch with our unconscious guidance. As a result, we become aware of our decisions as we’re making them.
Research also suggests that unconscious thought processes work more effectively than the conscious mind in complicated situations. They allow us to integrate complex information in a more holistic way. For that reason, the unconscious seems to be the source of our creativity, our insight, and often our memory as well. [See Kate Douglas, "The Other You," New Scientist (December 1, 2007), pp. 42-48.] Oracular techniques give us access to these powerful faculties.
Like all good oracles, The World Is Your Oracle opens a gateway to the unconscious mind for anyone who’s ready to listen to their own spiritual truth. By performing any one of the divinations contained in the book, a person’s self-awareness simply expands to encompass their inner wisdom.
As you can see from the story I told at the outset of this post, our sense of sight can open us powerfully to our intuition. I think Linnea’s cards have the same potential. Each of her exquisite paintings breathes life into the divination method it illustrates. From her adaptation of Persian miniature painting in Meditation (above) to her almost-medieval rendering of Fire, Linnea has evoked the energies of each of these oracular techniques in a way that will help people access them. But even more importantly, the cards themselves are stunning.
Linnea’s rendering of Daphne becoming a tree (or is it simply a woman searching for an oracular answer from a tree?) allows the viewer to experience the mysterious intertwining of our lives with those of our plant cousins. On the Intuition card, our gaze is rewarded with the recognition of how empowering our insight can be. The woman pictured smiles as she realizes the radiance of her inner wisdom shining into her awareness. The Mudras card not only portrays one of the simplest and most powerful of these Hindu hand gestures, but it also brings to mind the vitality of this type of “finger yoga.” Seeds connects heaven and earth as the seed depicted on the card sprouts and roots at the same time. Linnea painted this card as a powerful metaphor for intuitive deepening and the freedom it can create in our lives.
But my favorite of all the cards is Meditation (above). Any onlooker can feel the interconnections of the meditator in the painting with the world around him. The card exemplifies the underlying theme of The World Is Your Oracle. As my friend Rue Hass says in her book This is Where I Stand, “The wonderful thing about using the world as my oracle is that I become acutely aware of my presence in it, and my relationship to everything. EVERYTHING COMES ALIVE!” I’m sure I will come alive when I finally hold all of Linnea’s cards in my hands.
Visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery to see more of Linnea’s artwork, including the Seeds, Fire, Intuition, and Mudras cards.
Thank you for describing the practice. Encouraging individuals to trust themselves is wise. At the same time, such encouragement should include knowing when and whom to ask for help. We need each other.
I do have misgivings about the context you use to explain the practice. Yet I confess that for what you offer, the praxis comes before the theoria. Still the vocabulary of conscious versus unconscious “mind,” as well as inner versus outer and resort to whatever you may mean by “intuition,” is a system of notions that has been unraveling for a long time now.
However, the same can be said of Freud’s mythology of the personality as a kind of hydraulic system. Insofar as that enabled Freud to interact with his patients at a level of intimacy that reparented them enough to improve their social functioning, his mythology is justified. That mythology is often treated as some kind of universal truth rather than as a private framework of support for someone willing to take the risk of helping.
On the other hand, as my interest is in theoria, I find it necessary to be equally critical of abstract analyses that do not entail practice. Sometimes that provides a vocabulary for helpers to work together. In such a case, it can convey a benefit. When it is treated as abstract truth, however, the helper’s self-orientation gets turned into smug and arrogant condescension. My experience is that nothing is harder to do than to help someone else. Yet we must keep trying to learn how to do that better. Hence, please accept my admiration for your project.
I think your wonderful exploration and sharing on this is as vsiceral and intimately related to the Now as this extraordinary art
the Now, that is, in which we know and are connected to what is Great and to each other
A beautiful concept – as long as the “technique” and the “tools” always point to something beyond themselves.
Krishnamurti used to tell this story:
One day a man was walking down the street in the company of the Devil.
Ahead of them, they saw a person, with shoulders slumped and head bent, shuffling along .
Suddenly the person, stopped, bent over and picked something up from the sidewalk.
Then he let out a yell and went down the street waving his arms and laughting.
“What did he find?” asked the devil’s companion.
“He found truth.” answered the Devil.
“That must be very bad business for you.”
“Oh not at all” said the Devil, “he will now organize it.”
I love the Krishnamurti story!
Nancy, when is your book being published? How do we order a copy?
As a Wiccan noticing a connection to your writing, I began to read feeling deeply touched. An experience of my own almost 30 years ago often comes to consciousness now. I was working in a county hospital in an Inner City neighborhood and went out every break (6 PM-ish) to escape the new building fumes and be in touch with people able to live outside the locked psychiatric unit. Toward the end of my walk, talking to various neighbors and enjoying being steeped in a black neighborhood, a nicely dressed man (jogging suit) and matching walking shoes, who was well-groomed with trimmed hair, nicely shaved, approached me with his black labrador dog on leash. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I felt unaccountably terrified. He smiled asked, “Are you a Nurse?”. Feeling I was fleeing for my life I ran to the door saying, “Sorry Brother, I’m late for work.” with heart pounding. I felt deeply ashamed of a sudden burst of racism.
Within two days news of this serial killer who approached nurses, with his dog on leash, and killed nurses. He strangled a nurse to death who lived across the street from the hospital.
Intuition, according to nursing theory, is learning that has been repeated so often it is no longer conscious nor verbal, but that is very accurate. Having grown up in violent rural surroundings where my life was first threatened with murder at about kindergarten age, the information arose nonverbally.
Loving what you had to say, the sales pitch bothered me. Guess I’ve grown old and cynical. You may be serving Spirit with your work while I read, “Buy my stuff. Give me money.” in your pitch.
Thank you for the beautiful art and story, however.
PS Candace Pert says that we have brain cells in our big toes and that our “gut feelings” are the particularly sensitive brain cells in the GI tract. I think women are much more comfortable with the word and concepts of intuition. Freud–not so much. He was an early apologist for child abuse IMHO. Salvaged his career by developing theories that blamed the women who complained for their own exploitation at the hands of abusive male relatives.
Thank you, Rie TK, for your powerful story. This is exactly the kind of intuitive listening that I hope to encourage with my work.
And concerning my “sales pitch,” my book isn’t even finished yet, so I can’t offer to sell you a copy. I think I was just trying to let my readers know that I had some expertise in this area (expertise in the area of intuition would probably be considered an oxymoron by many people in our culture). However, I can see how you read it that way.
Thanks again,
Nancy