#soultarotchallenge Day 24: How can I become more intimate with my inner wildness? To answer this I pull THE HANGED MAN, and at first I don’t understand. How does this ultra receptive figure say anything about intimacy or wildness? Perhaps for me to get in touch with my wildness it looks like me saying put and being present. I was thinking about this recently when I was out in the nothingness of West Texas and I felt the desire to start smoking again. In that moment I just wanted something to shift my thinking or my feeling or my experience of life. I had to check myself and come back to center to remember what is actually important.
These days, what is important for me
is being present. So I just take a deep breath and lean into the vast feeling of the moment instead of smoking a cigarette or anything else to take me away from myself. And man this moment is kinda grueling, especially when I have this Tarot challenge to best, and I’m feeling totally uninspired. But that’s alright, I can recognize now that these feelings are like shadows shifting throughout the day. I can notice the patterns that they make, what they reveal and then what they conceal. I notice how the temperature shifts and I watch them dissipate. This is me getting really intimate with my wild streak, sitting in space and watching the shadows move throughout the day. Ive already spent most of my life running in circles and I’ve done every drug I could get my hands on. I been on week long benders and have had full blown hallucinations where I’ve had conversations with angels, entities and people who weren’t ever there. I’ve wound up in some strange situations and somehow I’ve made it out pretty unscathed, unless this is a coma dream that I’m having in some ICU somewhere? But barring that, what I realized, was for me to shift my consciousness I needed to quit doing drugs and drinking. For me, sobriety became the new frontier of psychedelic experience. When The Hangman shows up here I remember that shift and I think of all the ways I can still find to check out and disassociate. With this card I think about growing down into the world instead of trying to escape from it.
I guess for me, to go buck wild would look like me being really present with my experience of the now. Like really leaning into the cold wind of reality and noticing how it touches every fiber of my being. Before, when I looked for a visceral experience of the now I would drink a bottle of #oldcrow to shake off the fetters of the real and just flop like a pool noodle into the universe. But I’ve realized there’s not much longevity in that. For me intimacy with wildness looks like intimacy with the present. It is a deep sensual embrace of this shitty 50s themed nightmare of a diner. It looks like being really present with the lights and the smells and the Riche Valens on the jukebox. For me that is some next level shit on par with taking off my top, demanding shots, and then pounding a monster energy laced with #mdma to get me through the rest of dinner before slinking into a k-hole in one of bedroom set ups of the nearest Ikea. But hey, to each their own.