I've mostly been lurking here but this post got me thinking. We can't control the madness happening around us, but we can control our baseline. I keep coming back to this line and I'm not sure I agree with the premise underneath it. Like, what if the whole idea that we need to "stay grounded" is actually part of the problem? I've been reading Jung lately and he talks a lot about how the psyche naturally goes through periods of disorientation — that feeling unmoored might not be something to fix but something to actually... experience? I guess what I'm wondering is whether all these grounding techniques (and I'm not saying they don't work, they clearly do for you) are sometimes a way of resisting a process that your mind is trying to push you through. The anxious floating feeling — what if that's not a glitch but a signal? I don't know. I'm not trying to be contrarian for the sake of it. And I realize this is my first real post so maybe I'm coming in hot. But I've been sitting with this question a lot lately — whether the impulse to immediately re-center ourselves cuts off something we might need to sit with longer. The tarot connection I keep noticing is The Tower. Everyone treats it like this catastrophe card, but in my experience it's more about the moment before you rebuild. You can't skip to the grounding part without actually letting the structure fall first. Anyway. Just a thought. I'm not even sure I fully believe it yet.

"I threw the baby out with the bathwater and became a total skeptic for years" I think this is actually more honest than people realize. In my family, we never had that clean break because jyotisha and Ayurveda were just... what we did. But I've watched my own children struggle with something similar — they grew up seeing the rituals, and some of them rejected everything because they couldn't separate the practice from the dogma around it. What I'd offer, from my perch of fifty years and a nursing career where I watched a lot of people die, is something you might not be expecting. The crystals and tarot are fine, they're tools. But don't let them become another version of the structure you escaped. I've seen people trade one rigid system for another and call it freedom. The Upanishads talk about neti neti — "not this, not this" — as a way of stripping away everything that isn't the truth. Your skeptic phase was part of that stripping. Your exploration now might be too. The path isn't a line from wrong to right. It's more like peeling layers, and sometimes you peel past something valuable by accident. What brought me here? I retired last year and realized I missed talking about these things with people who aren't my relatives, where the conversation feels alive instead of rehearsed. Welcome.