Psychological healing through Rainring: approaches (1)
Outer and inner
It would be nice to think that the more I write about Rainring, the clearer and more accessible I make it. Yet it could be that the opposite is true. It could be that each new article, each additional explanation about the cards takes me further away, not closer, to the position of the person who is discovering Rainring for the first time. For this reason, in this article I am going to try and go back not just to the beginning, but even to before the beginning – to address myself not to people who already have, or who may easily develop an interest in the cards, but to those who are at a distance from them.
It seems to me that at least one avenue towards the cards is that provided by an awareness of hurt; of being in pain. I refer not to physical, but to emotional, to psychological pain. What does this mean?
Psychological, like physical pain, can be either acute or chronic. If my wife has just left me, or my son has been killed in an accident, I am going to be in acute emotional pain. After a certain amount of time, this acute pain will fade. Life goes on, despite everything. I will marry again, I will have another son… nothing lasts forever without changing. Of course, there will be a residue, something left over: perhaps I will be left with a question that I want but cannot find an answer to: why did this little boy, who never hurt anyone, have to die? There is likely to be chronic pain even after the acute pain has faded.
On the other hand, there are people who have a kind of long-lasting, low level sense of sadness, dissatisfaction, longing, disappointment… It is as if life has never really come up to their expectations. Perhaps at one point they thought that the problem was money, but they have made money and the pain has remained. Or they have changed wife or husband, gone to live in another country, altered their career path… Whatever they have done, that sense of something unfulfilled, that disappointment has remained. They, too, live with chronic pain.
There are also young people, usually the exceptionally sensitive ones, who have that sense of lack, of emptiness and distress or disturbance from an early age. It lives with them during adolescence and it never really goes away. Everything they may do later – work, family, travel… seems only to cover or mask the hurt, never to heal it.
I think that Rainring cards have the potential to help in these various kinds of lives where chronic pain is present.
What is behind this persistent, vague sense of disappointment, sadness, frustration and heartache? The most likely explanation, in my view, is that the roots of the problem go far back to childhood. Some would argue that they go further back still, to previous lives or incarnations, but this second, more controversial view does not invalidate the first.
What I have described above is the kind of life, the sort of biography where the activity, energy and effort has been mainly directed towards the outer world. In general, the first half of life – and certainly the first third – is largely based on this direction outwards, although there are exceptions. And I have further said that in many cases, there remains a vague sense that this outer-world focus leaves something unfulfilled.
There comes a point in many people’s lives where the outward focus is less and less able to drown out the inner voices of disquiet and distress. It is at this moment that such people need to achieve a major re-orientation. They need to look inside themselves. This is what Rainring is designed to facilitate. Yet this re-orientation is anything but straightforward.
The difficulty here is very often twofold: first, nothing in their education or upbringing has prepared them, given them the tools for this kind of work – for work it most certainly is; second, this orientation carries a stigma in our society: it is felt that there is something abnormal, perhaps medically sick or disturbed, about a focus upon one’s inner world. Such an orientation is not at all mainstream – so who could we find to guide us in this direction? The moment we begin to look there, we come across all kinds of strange people and practices, many of which will seem to us more or less crazy, thus further increasing the unease that we already feel about looking at this ‘alternative’ culture.
Our society has an extrovert bias, so that people may be involved in strange and abstruse practices with the outer – all kinds of extraordinary technical and technological research – without anyone turning a hair. But the moment we look inwards, we have left the mainstream, the area that most people are familiar and comfortable with, and then there is suspicion, incomprehension and worse. ‘For goodness sake, pull yourself together!’
Unfortunately, the Rainring cards cannot escape this labelling of ‘weird’, because they are based upon a premise which is absolute anathema to orthodox or mainstream scientific opinion. Scientists are comfortable with cause and effect: after a period of dry weather, the crops [if not irrigated artificially] fail for lack of water. But if I say that cards chosen unseen and at random from a pack will accurately portray where I am at in my life, or answer any question about my inner world that I care to ask, the scientist – or other person whose view of reality is restricted to that acceptable to science – is obliged to say: ‘I’m sorry, this is totally against the laws of science and therefore impossible – it is a delusion, a trick, a fantasy…’
There is no arguing with that. Card readers, however, consider that the ‘impossible’ not just can happen but always happens, and they have their own explanations for why it happens.
In a recent BBC Radio 4 survey, listeners were invited to send in their earliest memories. Some 2000 respondents described events which had taken place before the age of 2. According to the experts, this is impossible, as the brain is not sufficiently developed at that time. It is possible to write forever about events and situations which our science says cannot happen or occur. The general public, or the average member of it, is no longer so inclined to absolutely believe what the scientific experts tell us. Undoubtedly, the likes of Rainring are considered a few degrees less weird than would have been the case in previous eras. Nevertheless, it is still true that for a very large and influential section of the public, divinatory cards are pure, unadulterated bull.
The kind of person to whom I am addressing these remarks – someone whose instincts and habits are entirely those of the mainstream, will thus have to make a large leap of faith if they are ever to tangle with the Rainring cards. But the chronic pain to which I referred before is precisely one reason why someone might decide to take the plunge.
Make no mistake: Rainring is not mumbo-jumbo. On the contrary, to use Rainring is to begin to come face to face with who one really is, what is actually going on in one’s life. When I did a spread on the question of why people are not responding to my posts on Rainring, the summary card which I obtained was ‘Fear.’ This fear comes from the very fact that Rainring is not a load of bull, but is an adviser who does not pull their punches: one who is going to tell you straight what is going on with you, where you are at.
Conclusion
To say that Rainring may be of particular benefit to those in pain is not under any circumstances to imply that if you are feeling fine, it is not for you. Those who are already in touch with their inner world will find it of huge interest. Nonetheless, it is the case that, even among people such as tarot readers whom one might imagine familiar with their inner world, there is a marked resistance to Rainring, and one of the elements involved in that resistance is that, oddly perhaps, reading tarot is by no means an automatic recipe for being in touch with one’s own psyche and its manifestations.
Rainring is a therapeutic tool of enormous potential. But, just as the drinker who cannot admit to being an alcoholic cannot take even the first step on the road to recovery, so the individual who cannot admit that not all is well in the world inside them cannot take even the first step towards self-transformation. The psyche is a very strange thing: it is possible to know for years what does not work in one’s life, yet never to be able to admit it – even to oneself. I speak from personal experience! That state of soul necessitates that one run away from precisely that which would be capable of impacting on the problem. This, I am sure, is true of many who approach Rainring. And this is why, finally, I come back to my starting point: one of the factors which can destroy that resistance is pain: when I am hurting really more than I can bear then, finally, I seek help.
In the second article we will ask what help Rainring can give to those who are hurting.