Year of Practice 2023 begins March 20th. Here is an example of one of the daily emails that you’ll receive throughout the entire year, along with live Zoom classes/discussions, and access to a group Discord server.
As I’ve been plugged into the news today (and yesterday, and the day before), I find myself increasingly in an imbalanced Knight of Swords energy: agitated, overstimulated, hypervigilant.
We talked a bit about this Knight’s reluctance/inability to slow down, but another huge issue we have in this card is that we begin to perceive everything as a threat.
I think about Knight of Swords as a dragon-slayer. They have courage and the will to solve problems, to get to the heart of an issue. I’ve pulled it for Glennon Doyle’s tagline “we can do hard things”. Yes! We can do hard things; we can slay dragons. The problem is distinguishing real dragons from imagined dragons (har har), or even, at some point, foe from friend.
I’ve written about this Knight before as a berserker*. The history of these Viking warriors is really interesting, but the main thing is that during battle they would enter a sort of trance-like frenzy, and they could not tell enemy from ally. They lashed out at everything.
I ran across this Tweet that really showcased how an overstimulated Knight of Swords can present:
Dr. Julia Skinner (@BookishJulia) writes:
I’m thinking today about a former student who, while a shooter was rampaging through our university’s library, sent me an email from his phone, apologizing his paper would be late. “My laptop is near the shooter and I’m not sure I can get it.” He asked for a 12 hour extension.
So this poor kid, who was so accustomed to having to keep up, to meet deadlines, to achieve; in this moment, faced with a real and deadly threat, was ALSO and perhaps even MORE dialed into the perceived threat of a late paper.
We have so many difficult things to face and dragons to slay, in our personal lives and as a society. We get jumpy and irritable, just waiting for the next pile of shit to hit the fan. We feel like we can’t take off our armor, because what’s next? We start barking at our families, noises are too loud, we may wince as we open our phones to look at the news or read our texts but we can also feel like we MUST look, because we need to know the shape and size of the next dragon. Our systems get so out of whack, and our nerves totally fried. We cannot accurately perceive threat or urgency.
So today’s prompts are very simple:
This is not a dragon I need to fight right now.
This is not a dragon I need to fight right now.
(Continue to draw as many cards as you need to, for as many things as you’d like to lay down in this moment.)
The state of my nervous system right now
What support does it need?