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I pulled a card for myself Thursday morning from the Isis Oracle deck. No, not ISIS, the organization, but Isis, the Egyptian goddess who “as mourner, she was a principal deity in rites connected with the dead; as magical healer, she cured the sick and brought the deceased to life; and as mother, she was a role model for all women.” The card pulled was The Brother in Darkness, Overcoming Negative Energy with Feminine Power. The card starts off saying “When negative energy is present, it is a sign that we are ready to move more deeply into our feminine Divine Power. [...] You shall overcome with grace and triumph. Stay in your heart. There is no need to be afraid.” We all have both feminine and masculine power within us. Think of it like yin & yang energy - the ability to surrender and let inertia take place (feminine) while also knowing when to take action and initiate the motion (masculine). This has nothing to do with what you identify as but more so how spirit/energy working through us.
The focus was for us to sit with the negative energy with compassion, something that I’ve talked about before in regards to negative feelings. No judgment, just allow the emotion or darkness to be seen. The next step though, is to create the energy of love from your heart space, as if a big, bright beam lights up (yup, like the Care Bear photo I included in a few emails back) and have it expand out to the negative energy. Let the healing energy start with yourself and then expand out to heal others, starting with one person and then another, and then to a whole region. This made me think of the Loving Awareness or Loving Kindness meditation. To allow the healing of ourselves and our own darkness to create the inertia to inspire others to heal themselves.
I wrote down that I wanted to talk about emotional intelligence in the workplace and this goes hand in hand with it. Life is a spectrum- when we compartmentalize, we risk suppressing emotions rather than working through them when they come up. It’s like putting a ripe banana in a bag until you’re ready to eat it, but in the darkness it ends up making it rot faster and then when you go to eat it/deal with it, it’s festered and becomes worse than when you first put it in the bag. When emotions come up, give yourself the space to sit with it. Excuse yourself from a meeting or if you feel supported in the environment, mention “this is coming up for me right now” and process out loud with them. Emotions are messengers, don’t leave them left on read :)
I took a workshop a couple weeks ago called “Love Languages in the Workplace.” No, it wasn’t talking about dating in the workplace, but more so, how do people receive praise and feel appreciated. We all speak and understand different love languages. It reminds us that people are not machines and that we have different personalities and lived experiences. Appreciation is love. Gratitude is love. How we show appreciation and how we understand appreciation comes in many forms, but there are five main categories: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and physical touch. If someone has physical touch as their most dominant love language, in the workplace might look different than with a partner- a handshake or pat on the back might suffice - as always, consent is necessary. For words of affirmation - a note expressing gratitude or simply saying something about acknowledging their work/efforts. We are human in the workplace, not machines. We have feelings, emotions, likes, dislikes, etc. Getting to know who you work with is beneficial to work getting done. A friend of mine coaches a lot of UFC fighters and he says he has to be adaptive as a coach. He says some guys do well when he’s in their face, yelling at them to be better or words of encouragement, where other guys want specific feedback on how to be better. How he approaches practice for each fighter he works with is different. He is of service to his fighters and for them to optimally perform, he has to know who they are inside and out. When they win, he wins. When he wins, they win. This applies to work environments outside of sports, and not just for workplaces but with family dynamics, friends, etc.
So how do these two concepts tie together? Remember that the external world is a reflection of our internal world. How we perceive things shows where our work is. If we see things and do not find the gratitude or cannot see the lesson, then where is that a reflection of something inside of us that we either need to show gratitude for or learn & grow from? When we can heal ourselves and focus on the signs/emotional messages that come up for us (the first part of the loving kindness meditation), we can then do that for others. We can hold space better for others who might not be where we are (the second part of the loving kindness meditation). When we put effort into understanding ourselves and who we are at our core, we can better understand ourselves in relation to others. When we are in management/leadership/teaching positions, this is important to understand. When we can impart loving kindness to ourselves, we can impart it on others, and when they do their healing work (when they’re ready, we can’t control that timeline), then they will be able to hold space for someone else in their healing. It causes disruption for people, in a good way. Enough disruptions can make someone start to wonder, “why does this keep happening?” and maybe begin to look at life differently. Shift in perspective = shift in life.
When you’re ready, forgive those parts of ourselves who didn’t know better in the past. We were doing the best we could. It provides opportunity and space for us to also forgive others… and when there’s forgiveness, it provides opportunity for growth. When there’s growth, there’s evolution. Love yourself. Love others. Love. Easy? Relative. A practice? Worth it.
“What the world needs now, is love, sweet love…”