Being on the floor, or better yet, sitting outside on the ground, puts you in contact with the earth. Energetically, you can feel the difference. I challenge you right now to go and sit or lie down somewhere where you can be on the floor or on the ground, and then get up again and sit or lie somewhere where you do not have contact with the ground. Go ahead, we’ll wait!

Can you feel the difference?

I wish I could give you a good solid scientific reason for this. Right now, all I can think of is the movie Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis is advised to take off his shoes and walk around barefoot after a plane flight so that he can reconnect with the Earth’s magnetic field. There is something to this, though — next time you fly somewhere, try walking around barefoot after your flight like Bruce Willis–you’ll feel the same difference in energy that you felt from my stand up/sit down/lie down exercise above. If you are someone who likes to work with crystals, you can easily appreciate that the Earth, magnetically/energetically, is like a giant crystal. You can feel the same energy by going to a part of the country where you can spend time around mountains. If you connect with the Earth, just like when you hold or wear a crystal, you connect with a powerful healing force — and if you do this while meditating, you pull the healing power of the Earth into your meditation. You can still do this to some degree if you are seated in a chair (especially if you have your feet touching the ground) or lying in bed — but if you are actually on the floor, it will be much more effective.

Here are some techniques to try:

During your meditation, imagine yourself growing roots down into the Earth. Feel that you are drawing your support and your nourishment from the Earth. You may even want to visualize the Earth holding you protectively or cradling you. This can be very powerful if you are feeling spacey or insecure.

While lying in savasana, imagine all your stress and all the negativity that you are surrounded with draining out of you and into the Earth. Don’t worry that your negativity will hurt the Earth. Instead, think in terms of composting it — allowing the Earth to take that negative energy and transform it into nourishment for all of Earth’s living creatures. Just like tossing your kitchen scraps into the compost pile!

My first two suggestions above have to do with energy flowing one way — into you or out of you. But you can do both at the same time, by pairing these visualizations with your in and out breaths. Breathing in, pull nourishing grounding energy up into you from the Earth. Breathing out, let negativity flow out into the Earth where it can be transformed. This practice can clean you out energetically and leave you feeling focused, awake, and ready for your day.

But don’t take my word for it — try it yourself and leave a comment about your experience below.

But productivity paralysis doesn’t have to be a death knell. It can instead be a delay — a delay that you can slowly chip your way out of.

I took my first step out of depression-based productivity paralysis today by picking up a deck of cards and asking simply, “what should I be doing right now?”

First, though, a word about the deck I chose for this exercise: it’s a new deck that I have never written about in this space before, the Wisdom of the House of Night cards, an oracle (not tarot) deck. Before reading with this deck I decided to make some alterations to it (so if you have the same deck, my images may look a little different). I trimmed the borders off with a paper cutter, and, since that meant that I also lost the words and numbers printed on each card, I wrote them back onto the cards with gold and silver craft markers (which unfortunately smeared a little as they dried). The result is a much smaller deck that fits in my hands as if it were a mini-deck. It is half the size of the House of Night cards that I originally bought.

So here are the cards I drew: Reminder, Belonging, Focus. A reminder to focus on the work that I belong in, and on finding the exact place and group of people (if you’re familiar with the House of Night books, you know that the House of Night is in many ways a place of refuge for people who don’t fit the standard mold) where I belong. To me, that’s a reminder to spend more time on and make more of a priority of tarot and other spiritual work. I especially love that the sunset on the Belonging card looks much like the sunset I often see out my office window. These cards (the Focus card, in particular) are also a reminder to use the tools that have been placed in my hands.

If I take an even closer look at these cards, there is more advice to be gleaned. Both the first and the third cards show images of earth and nature. Connecting with earth, and even looking upon earth as our mother (as hokey as that sounds) can be a helpful way to release negative emotions that bring on productivity paralysis. It is possible to lie on the ground (savasana, yoga’s corpse pose, is a good way to do this) and let negativity drain out of you into the earth, where it can be composted and transformed into something nourishing. At the same time, earth can hold you up and fill you with grounding, calming, down to earth energy — just what is needed. The middle picture, showing a house or large building, tells me that my particular productivity paralysis is related to first chakra level anxiety — anxiety about things like home, family, security. Common concerns, but we have to look at them and delve into them, or at least prioritize them, to be able to make a difference. Finally, the woman shooting the arrow on the focus card is using a flaming arrow: fire, enthusiasm, creativity, all directed at one important target. This clue tells me more than anything else: that I should not only be doing work in a place where I belong, but that it should be something I am passionate about, something that fires me up. So, here I am!

If you have a practical tarot question that you’d like to have answered in this space, please write to me at readings@tarotsalve.com. If you have a practical tarot question that you’d like to keep more private, please choose a reading from the options on my Readings pages (or write to me directly if you prefer).

H. Ellis, thank you very much for volunteering! I don’t mean to be difficult, but I can’t answer your question in exactly the form in which it was asked. I can’t think of a disease that has ever been cured, though I can think of some that have been prevented through improvements in nutrition and sanitation (scurvy, dysentery) and in some cases because of vaccines (polio, smallpox). But is preventing a disease really the same as curing it? You’ll think I’m splitting hairs, but I don’t believe that there is such a thing as a cure — only a treatment.

So, I’m answering an alternate question which I hope is still in the spirit of the original: what is the next major medical advance that we will see in our lifetimes? 

Answer: virtually bloodless surgery.

In answering this question, I also ran into a problem: I found that I knew the answer without resorting to pulling any cards. When this question came into my mind, I kept seeing images of swords cards. In addition to that, in my research for my day job as a science writer, I often run across technology that is being used to make new and amazing imaging of parts of the human body possible. It is already possible to have laser surgery to correct vision disorders. It doesn’t take much psychic ability (in my opinion) to see where medical science is headed. So I’m not going to draw any cards in response to this question — it just feels silly to draw cards for a question that I know (or at least feel very confident in) the answer to. Sorry! This won’t do much to alleviate your tarot skepticism. But I would love to answer another question, H. Ellis, if you have one.

If you are a tarot skeptic and want me to try answering your question in this space, please write to me at readings@tarotsalve.com. 

But then our car died, and so did the next one. And we had the chance to buy a car that we like a lot — but it has a manual transmission. My husband thinks he can teach me to drive it….so we bought it. But I couldn’t resist asking my tarot cards how this is going to work out. I asked:

1. What is my biggest obstacle in learning how to drive this car? Answer: reversed Eight of Pentacles. Looks like I may have a bit of a chip on my shoulder — the attitude that no matter how much work I put into this, it will not work. False starts. The idea that I am not wired to drive this kind of car. Anxiety!!!

2. What is my biggest strength in learning how to drive this car? Answer: reversed Queen of Pentacles. I think of this as sort of a Queen cubed: someone who is good with details, good with dealing with practical matters, much like the upright Queen of Pentacles, but in this case, the level of attention to those details is overthought to the point of absolute obsessiveness. Oh, I can do obsessive overthinking attention to detail. Yes, I can. It’s what I’m best at! How nice to know that there is at least one aspect of life where obsessive overthinking can turn into a strength…and how interesting to know that I have some reversed Queen of Pentacles in me. (I tend to think of myself as more of a Queen of Cups type.)

3. What will be the outcome of me trying to learn to drive this car? Answer: (of course I wound up drawing two cards!) Three of Wands and Seven of Pentacles. I will get out of this effort what I put into it (Seven of Pentacles) and, I will also get out of it what I expect (Three of Wands). Thanks a lot, cards. If I was hoping for a “you are not going to be able to drive this car, please don’t even try” reading, I didn’t get it…

A final note about these cards: it makes sense to me that out of three cards pulled for this issue, three are from the suit of pentacles. Driving is definitely a practical, material matter–and one that all too often involves the exchange of money (pentacles look a lot like coins, don’t they?).