Rainring Masterclass 5 set 6 card 48: Heart / Grief

94stranger

48. Heart / Grief: group – heart (3 green)
http://www.rainringcards.com/Cards/Grief/48.aspx

The Image

The left side of the image is occupied by the upper half of a figure, seemingly a woman, with the face hidden and the posture suggesting a state of grief. She wears a white blouse-like garment, and we see the beginnings of an orange red skirt or trousers below a belt. The latter is marked with stripes in the nine colours of the groups of Rainring. The effect is perhaps to suggest that, using a parallel metaphor, ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ – beyond grief lies hope. The right side of the image is occupied by an imposing tree in full leaf. This might imply the reassurance that grief, like rain, is natural in the sense of being a part of nature.

Heart
The Heart function

The bi-polar octagon of Rainring is comprised of the four sets of opposites which make up the psyche. Heart lies at the centre of these. The two basic ones are male-female (east-west) and unconscious-conscious (north-south). Heart is at the mid-point of these, as of the other psychic influences. Heart energy is that associated with the green of the heart chakra, which lies at the centre of the body’s seven energy nodes, the chakras. Its fundamental characteristic is as the source of balance. In the 4-mention pack, Heart north (unconscious) is Rainring, because the latter’s essential purpose is also balance. As a heart-function person, you embody all this, meaning that your natural position will always be in the middle, never at the poles, whatever parameters are involved. The ‘heart of the matter’ means the core or centre of something.

The meaning

If you are a Heart-function person, you will be moderate in your opinions, diplomatic in social relations and dislike extremes of all kinds. You will be a warm, caring and supportive friend, and have an instinctive empathy for children.

When this card comes up, it means that you display a warm and empathetic attitude, neither cool, reserved and aloof as at the Spirit end of the spectrum, nor passionate, wild and extravagantly emotional as at the Will end. It may also refer to adopting a position as mediator – helping people in conflict to resolve their differences, or simply using your influence in a social situation to assert a moderate viewpoint and secure a retreat from extreme positions.

Grief
The place of grief

Given the extreme distress caused by systematic heavy repression of emotion, it is no doubt inevitable that there should be at least one emotion more socially acceptable, and therefore capable of acting to a degree as a safety-valve. This is the position of grief. Having said this, anyone who has heard the distraught parent trying desperately to shut up the small child wailing its heart out in a public place will know that the acceptability of expressing grief is a matter of degree. Fear and anger are crisis emotions: associated with an immediate threat to the self. Once that immediate crisis has passed, the sense of relief expresses itself quite naturally as grief. Both anger and fear lead there, as anyone who has experienced grief following on from either of these two can attest. It is therefore the third position in the cycle of the emotions.

The meaning

Within the word grief, we include various shades of feeling.

You are sad. This may express itself in tears, perhaps involving crying or even, in intense grief, deep sobbing. Or you may be carrying a weight of pain, hurt which could show in your expression, but is not being externalised in any specific form. The word grief is also often used for a longer-term situation than is sadness. Grieving is a process which may extend over many months, for example after the sudden death of a loved one. We would then expect the card Grief to come up for you more often than in other circumstances. You can of course experience such grief both as an agonising pain and equally, at other times, as a dull ache which persists somewhere in the background, reminding us that Grief covers a range of feeling, from greater to lesser intensities. You may talk about heartache, a broken heart etc which confirms the association of grief with the heart – you can experience it in some cases as an actual physical sensation in your heart area.

Finally, the words hurt and pain are often associated with grief, though they can apply to other emotions also, such as despair. But we tend not to talk about being hurt or in pain in relation to anger or fear, for example.

Divination summary

GRIEF: sadness, unhappiness, grief, sorrow, hurt, pain; HEART: mediation, moderation, reconciliation, lack of extremes, taking a middle position; friendship, warmth, empathy, affection, kindness, caring attitude, emotional support; steadiness, reliability, tolerance; getting to the core of an issue, being at the centre of what is happening
 

ana luisa

Isolation. This card screams "Leave me alone". The lady is closing herself up to the world. Entirely. There's not part of her body visible (even the hair is covering her face). She feels too fragile to let the outside world "touch" her. She is curling up for protection. This attitude could come from guilt (depending on the cards near it) or simply show a specific time of oversensitivity. However, I would tend to see , given the green color that it is nature related (we even have a tree on the background) that this card is probably representative of a person who has a very fragile nervous system, and need to retreat from time to time. The colored sash and vivid color outfit suggests that she is not a particularly depressed type but simply a person who has to "stop" evey once in a while for recharging her emotional batteries.