Hanging Out in the Upside Down

The Tarot card that has been showing up for me a lot lately is the Hanged One. It’s a strange image where a person is hung upside down by one foot from a tree—sometimes even underwater—but who seems somehow perfectly comfortable. It makes me think of Odin, the Norse god, who cut out one of his eyes and hung himself by the tree of knowledge for nine days and nine nights in order to gain the wisdom of the universe. It’s a reminder that there is only so much knowledge that can be gained in the right-side-up world, where everything is normal and nothing is going wrong. Most of us wouldn’t choose the trials Odin volunteered himself for, but we tend to end up suspended in the Upside Down at some point in our lives anyway. 

I’m having one of those weeks that I know many of you have had (or are having right now), where, due to no choice of my own, I’m hanging out in the Upside Down. It’s not my first time here, and I know by now that struggling and fighting it isn’t going to get me out of the tree any faster. I know I have to surrender to it. To breathe through my feelings. To trust that I won’t be stuck here forever. Even if I really don’t want to do any of that. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think everything happens for a reason. I don’t think of God as someone who rewards or punishes. I wish that all our attempts to align our energies and befriend our light and our shadows were enough to protect us from ever having any bad feelings again. I know that my hard-won Bad Times Skills aren’t meant to protect me from ever getting hurt again, but rather to help me get through it when the hurt inevitably comes. They help me empathize. They help me stay kind to myself even when I’m angry. They help me remember that there is wisdom to be gained in the Upside Down.

In Yoshi Yoshitani’s tarot deck, the Hanged One (or Hanged Man) is represented as Sleeping Beauty. Last week, I watched the old animated film with my son for the first time in many years, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. It’s from that Disney era where the characters weren’t so much fully developed humans as mythological archetypes, and the story has more symbolic truth to it than I remembered. 

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Due to some deep source of unknown maleficence, the evil queen Maleficent curses the princess Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a coma on her 16th birthday. When she does, Maleficent tucks her away in the castle’s tower, surrounding her with a thicket of sharp briars. This makes me think, inevitably, of trauma. Some terrible experience from the past makes us take our tenderest, most vulnerable parts and lock them away somewhere no one can get to them. Aurora’s rescuer, Prince Philip, is, however, gifted a Sword of Truth and a Shield of Virtue by the good fairies, and the engine of true love allows him to hack through the briars only to meet Maleficent again, now as a fire-breathing dragon that he must slay. 

His Sword of Truth reminded me so much of the suit of Swords in the tarot deck. Many of the Swords cards are difficult because they have to do with the double-edged quality of our thoughts, and specifically about the narratives that we make up in our heads about what our experiences mean. Prince Philip has to learn to use the Sword of Truth with discernment, to see the difference between the truth and the false narratives we surround ourselves with in order to keep our tender parts safe. That’s what allows him to break through the thicket of briars, reach the castle, and conquer the fire-breathing dragon that is jealously protecting the princess. 

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When we’re stuck in the Upside Down, we need a rescuer, someone worthy of the Shield of Virtue, who knows about the goodness hidden deep beneath our rage and pain. We need someone who can, ideally, befriend our dragons, learn about them, and listen to what they need, so they can lead us to our unconscious places and help them to wake up. Other people can certainly help us with this process, but ultimately we are going to have to figure out how to be our own true loves, to rescue ourselves from this inner drama.

So if you’re here with me in the Upside Down (and there are a lot of us here, globally, in this particular moment), welcome. It’s not a bad thing to be here. It doesn’t have to be scary. Some of us will need to be Sleeping Beauty, to rest for a while in a protected place before it’s time to change. Some of us will need to be the dragon, breathing fire, protecting the castle. And some of us will be able to be Prince Philip, to learn the power of discernment with the Sword of Truth, wake up our inner beauty, and allow ourselves to change, to become whoever it is we’ll be on the other side. 

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If you want some help befriending your inner dragons, check out my Pathfinding program. We can work together to figure out that sword of truth!