Wellbeing Health Retreats

Words such as "depressed" and "anxious" don’t exist in some American Indian and Alaska Native languages. Quite a contrast from modern society, where The World Health Organization names depression as the single leading cause of disability globally.

If you were born after 1945, you’re 10 times more likely to experience depression. From 2005-15, cases of depressive illness increased by nearly a fifth. Around 1 in 5 people won’t make it through the year without having a battle with mental illness.

In 1827, during the European colonisation of North America, a doctor met with over 20,000 native Americans to check on their health. He never saw or even heard of a case of insanity among them. His insights don’t appear to be isolated, the consensus is that mental illness was absent in tribal cultures.

Read more: Wellbeing Health Retreats

Magician in Tarot

The Magician card is the first in the major arcana, with the Fool card given the numbering zero being both the start of the soul’s journey and the end.

It begins the first pairing, or polarity, between the masculine and feminine or yin and yang.

Whereas the High Priestess represents going inward and nurturing our intuitive capacities, the Magician represents taking action and being fully incarnate in the physical world. 

You may have heard the aphorism, “some people are so spiritual they are of no earthly good to anyone.”

This is not the case with this tarot card.

When it arises in a reading it indicates an upsurge of energy to begin something, master a skill, focus and create.

Manifestation begins with a thought. Applying concentration, will and energy to something moves it from a desire to an actuality.

Read more: The Magician Tarot

Couple Retreat

Of all the myths causing heartache, few compare to the one which says that once we track down our elusory soulmate, everything will fall into place for us.

Anaïs Nin put it succinctly when she said: “Where the myth fails, human love begins.”

Mythologist Joseph Campbell teased this idea out further, saying:

“The whole thing in marriage is the relationship and yielding - knowing the functions, knowing that each is playing a role in an organism. One of the things I have realized - and people who have been married a long time realize - is that marriage is not a love affair.

A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament: you give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person: you're giving to the relationship. And if you realize you are in the relationship just as the other person is, then it becomes life building, a life fostering and enriching experience, not an impoverishment because you're giving to somebody else...

What a beautiful thing is a life together as growing personalities, each helping the other to flower, rather than just moving into the standard archetype. It's a wonderful moment when people can make the decision to be something quite astonishing and unexpected, rather than cookie-mold products.”

So how did that play out in concrete terms in his own life?

Read more: Couple Retreat

Tarot the lovers

To understand the lovers tarot card it’s important to recognise that it is one of 22 major arcana cards which represent archetypal development or what we could call the soul’s journey.

The fool tarot card

The fool tarot is numbered as zero. Some say this is because we start our journey as the ignorant fool and grow into the wise fool. Others hold that it recognises our unlimited potential, thus it should be unnumbered. Then some argue the Fool is outside of the number systems as he is the character experiencing the journey.

Read more: Tarot The Lovers