Finding our Inner Strength

 

So a month has passed since my last blog but time seems to be losing its meaning and keeping a grip on the passing of time seems almost impossible. So much is happening and yet at the same time, so little. I have said before how I rarely watch the news but lately it’s been impossible to avoid the news coming in. Like the sun that is at its full power the harshness of what is occurring around the world and at home, is being reflected whether its in the political, economic or ecological stories. It all needs processing in some way or else we become completely numb to it.

Leaving Cancer and working hard to feel everything, however, difficult that might be, we are now arriving in Leo. We are leaving the embrace of the mother energy and connecting with the father. The sun, that represents the royal seed, the divine inheritance in us all, asks us to dig deep into our individual power and wield it with love and empathy. 

One of the first books I read on the occult struck a chord with me when it spoke of balancing the masculine straight line energy with the feminine circular energy. It explained that this combination creates a spiral, the foundations of life itself.

I believe, we have lost our understanding of power, and are out of kilter. As the individual continues to maintain importance over community we are heading further into crisis. The masculine attributes, with the removal of the feminine, are masquerading as strength when actually we, as a society are floundering. 

Of course, this is a general view and where there are those who break the rule, we see pockets of communities flourishing and thriving. However, you don’t have to look far to see people in crisis, people struggling to hold back feelings of overwhelm or intense anger, 

I believe it is important to recognise what is going on for people and enable them to voice their pain. When we stifle our feelings we create a brittle exterior that does little to hide our suffering. If people are given space to speak about their fears, explain what is going on for them, just being listened to can work wonders. On the other hand, when we find ourselves on the other side, the side of the witness, it is important not to attempt to solve the problems. This a trait we all can so easily fall into. 

It is time for us to relearn how to engage with each other, how to engage with our community and how to understand our own sense of power. 

It is time to let go of our need to be right, our need to know everything and our fear of failure or of not being control. All these beliefs have led us into a cutthroat and competitive way fo life, where at the extremities of society, the have nots are literally being trampled on by the haves and those in the middle are complicit either in their desperate attempt to raise their status or in their silence. Only the few are trying to turn this around.

It is not my aim to judge, justify or blame, as I am very much part of this story.  However, it is my hope that by writing these words I, as I cannot speak for anyone else, can find a way, an energy within me, a sense of purpose that gives power to my words which will lead to a change in myself.

As I have explored, discussed and meditated on all these ideas I have learned that there is always an alternative if we simply change the direction of our gaze, reset our inner guidance system. The more I ground myself, digging my garden and connecting with Mother Earth, the stronger my roots are. This enables me to connect with my inner strength and all my masculine qualities, which can then secure my sense of resilience and help me to embody my power. 

We would do well to connect our masculine with our feminine attributes (if we have reclaimed them in Cancer) so we can find a state of balance, for power without love is weakness and love without power is what we see all around us today. I feel we have lost the true understanding of both of these virtues and until we connect to our divinity, our divine sense of self we will never regain our true power or learn how to wield it. How can we know what we don’t know?

If we decide to choose a different path we might find a route illuminated with answers. But first, before we make this decision we would do well do empty our mind of probable outcomes, for this will limit our possibilities. Then, like the Leo lion, we might choose to sit and tend the fire, allow the inspiration from within to rise up from the stillness, and listen.

Diving in the Deep End

 

Summer has well and truly arrived and this month is a hot one. Now this is nothing new but somehow as I sense into the extremes that Mother Nature is throwing at us I recognise the extremes we are throwing back at her. 

After the busyness of last month’s activity and energy, once again we feel the contrast as we slip into what the astrologers call, the sweet spot, when we can see, taste and smell the nectar all around us. This is an invitation to slow into this feeling state, after the heady, thinking activities of Gemini.

This month is ruled by the moon, our mother, the deep feminine wisdom that we all have access to if we filter out the noise from the brain and drop into our emotions, our feelings. Here we feel ourselves expand, tingle and who knows what can arise. We can begin to feel vulnerable here, and unaccustomed to these feelings, we generally run away and head back up to the rational processes of the brain. This is the world we inhabit as a culture and this is what has caused the crisis we are now facing on an increasing scale. 

This month is symbolised by the crab, with its hard outer shell and soft inner belly. For millennia, we have developed the former but forgotten the latter. Now we are experiencing younger generations who, although many are repeating the parents way, some are beginning to open up to this vulnerability and are feeling everything. This, with what is being handed down to them, is mostly very painful. Generations of numbing ourselves from feeling has placed our children in an unprotected place. There is little handed down wisdom how to find resilience to this wide open way of being. It is something we have generally neglected to have in our tool kit; it wasn’t taught so it wasn’t passed down.

However, I am not placing blame here, I am just trying to make sense of what is happening and how to move forward with the awareness.

I believe, the wisdom is there; the healing, the resilience, the ability to remember how to negotiate these times is innate in us all. Those that wish to participate emotionally in these changing times just have to slow, breathe and feel in, everything we need is there.

We also have the support of the mother energy. When we tap in she is holding, guiding us and connecting us so we don’t have to feel we are doing this alone. It’s not only that we can’t do this alone but the answer is in knowing that doing it together is the only way we can succeed. We are being asked to drop out of our ego mind mentality and dive into our feeling familial senses. 

This month’s archetypal energy is all about family, tapping into our roots our ancestry. When we bring all past and present kin and kindness together we can move forward with our community engaging as a caring, cohesive and  sustainable body.

When I saw an article in the Guardian that announced that the Amazon rainforest is now emitting more carbon than it is absorbing, my heart sank. We speak of tipping points and targets but this is a moment, I feel, this requires some time for reflection. A time to consider with our heads and sense with our hearts, what comes up for me? 

After a lifetime of suppressing emotions, a way of being, handed down by my family’s need to protect itself again religious and racial persecution, I have chosen - as this persecution isn’t something I experience, just a collective trauma embedded in my body - to attempt to break the ingrained patterning and learn to feel again.

Knowing I am one of many, a whole community of people treading this path, makes it easier. However, the emotions that are released, even though they are highly controlled, as is my way, feel like a volcano on a ticking bomb, beautifully in sync with the timing our environment is currently working on.

Listening to Greta’s clear and beautiful statement at the Austrian World Summit, spoke to so many as she told the politicians what they are too scared to face; the fact that all these summits are just a smoke screen for appearing to do everything while actually doing nothing, putting our Mercurial jester in the headlines once more.

The changes will never happen if we expect our leaders to do it for us. This was never going to be easy, it will be painful, scary and messy but it is for us to wake up to and lead them, show them how to come back to their hearts as we come back to ours.      

I hope you feel this too and are willing to dive in.

Rewriting our Story

 

As the year gets close to the half way point, I like to reflect on the different cycles in our lives and how they impact us, whether they are the turn of the day to night, or the phases of the moon or the yearly cycle, each have their unique qualities but each also reflect each other.

The solstices for me hold huge portent and this one never more so. The archetypal wisdom that this month holds is all about the twins, the understanding of the two states that we inhabit, the physical and the limitless. 

I believe, that when the twins are on speaking terms (as this energy is all about communication) then we can inhabit our bodies wisely and coherently. However, when we are not connected or even aware of anything beyond our physical minds then we become the arrogant king, who isn’t aware that they have lost all their power.
Ruled by Mercury, this god is the jester, the fool who plays the gods against each other because only he can flit from one realm to the other, carrying messages of wisdom or folly. It is left to us to decipher which the messages contain.

Sadly, we now inhabit a world that is caught up in a whirlwind of too much information with no guidance system to help us know what to believe and what to discard. The only guidance we had we threw out with the bathwater centuries ago when we went down the path that crushed the emotional wisdom that we hold in our body, in particular in our heart and our gut. 

Of course we are not to blame, we chose this journey as an experience of being human (as we have done many times before) so that we could choose to take the hero’s journey, through the dark night of the soul and find our way home.

We can only do this if we face all aspects of ourselves, the issues that are easy and those that are difficult, and decide to raise our awareness above the mindset of the arrogant king. Then we can climb down from our pedestal to understand what it is to be the wise fool. As the jester we can regain our sense of humour and expand our consciousness. From this vantage point we can start to grow, to communicate as whole human beings and find the balance we need to be able to listen to our inner guidance. 

I watch despondently, yet another G7 Summit, as the information, and our sloth-like actions start to stack up against us. Our ability to make the necessary changes we need to right the misjudgements of previous actions against our environment seems painfully lacking. 

My sense is that our only chance is to start believing in magic; what happens when we work together and imagine our way out of this crisis with our hearts, minds and bodies wide open to ideas beyond the usual tried and tested formulae. We need something right out of the box.

We will soon arrive at the Summer Solstice and begin the journey, once more, into the long, dark nights. Let’s hope this year we might stop running away from what needs to be done, and just begin to step into this without fear of making changes and without blaming others to such an extent we prevent ourselves from taking any personal action. We can only do this together with full self-responsibility and determination.

The Land Speaks; But Who is Listening?

 What a spring we are having. Nothing like last year; a proper spring with rain and sun and even some hail! This time of year is always so beautiful whatever the weather. For me, it’s even more special because I know it’s fundamental to who I am and who I am not. When Mother Nature comes to life and expresses herself in this incredibly abundant way, she is asking us to do the same; to feel how plentiful life is just in the simple things. She shows us how gratitude helps us to feel that our cup is full. This is something no material objects can offer. This is just a felt sense of wealth in the joy of being alive.

The more I grow into this way of being the more I realise how little I understood this, how far I was from being able to embody this - when it is all about embodiment - and how far I have yet to go. 

I sense the world is also struggling with this concept, that we have an in-built feeling of being impoverished and it has been handed down from previous generations so that the younger generations are not just feeling poor in spirit, many feel that fear is fundamental to their lives, and for some, that life is almost worthless.

This fills me with great sadness.

I know I have lived a fortunate life and have been lucky enough to see everything as an opportunity. When events are offered on a grand scale like the one we are experiencing now as a race, I believe, this is an opportunity we would be foolish to ignore. I feel that this time could be a really important moment to re-evaluate what is happening in our society. We have created real problems that are felt collectively and have been feeling for so long, I sense we have become numb to them. Is it possible that the pandemic has highlighted some of these in a way that is not just asking but demanding that we open our hearts and eyes to what is really going on in our communities? 

The other night I attended a zoom meeting by the organisation Shelter. They spoke about the struggles suffered by a high number of our population in this country who are not having their basic needs met, who are living in substandard living conditions with no feeling of security in their tenure, paying high rents and are terrified of speaking out for fear of eviction.

On the other side we have landlords terrified of their tenants that they are going to damage their property or refuse to pay rent or are just bad people.

It’s a shocking state of affairs. Our basic needs are all wrapped up in how we live, our homes, our security and our ability to put food on the table. If this lacks stability or worse, is non-existent for a high proportion of people in this country, then we are a country in crisis, It is time to truly own this and decide as a nation that a we cannot continue like this if we want our children to grow up healthy and with abundance in their hearts.. 

Watching what is going on in Jerusalem at the moment, my heart feels overwhelmed with grief. The situation there, in what I believe is the spiritual heart of the world, acts as a mirror for us and it is a perfect way, if we can view the issues objectively, by looking through someone else's eyes, to look at ourselves.

I do believe we have a choice, I believe we can decide to turn things around. We might choose to start looking at our relationship to our humanity, our inability to feel the plight of others. If we did, might we be prepared to stand up and do something about it as a nation? This general sense of lacking in empathy can be reflected in our relationship with Mother Earth; the way we are blind to the wake of destruction we create and dissociated from the fact that this could bring about our own destruction. Are our senses so frozen that we cannot wake up to this reality? 

I believe that through limitation comes expansion, yet if we are determined to simply get back to normal after the pandemic and miss this huge opportunity for change, what will it take to shake us out of our malaise?

I know I am not alone in wanting to do something but feeling too small and insignificant, against the tide of collective inertia, to make the shift we so desperately need. 

I can only trust that by continuing to connect with Mother Earth and her limitless bounty, she will show me how, from this place of rootedness, to move into action in a way that has a power born out of peace and grace. It is the children who will show us the way and so I entreat you to plug in, feel the life force of Mother Nature within, and follow their lead.

A Fresh Start

I love this time of year! Like a jack-in-a-box I feel like my energy is rejuvenated and the warm sunshine gets me out with a renewed enthusiasm for life. This is exactly what Mother Nature does to us and as we turn the wheel once more back to the beginning of the seasonal year after a long time in hibernation we are being asked to jump into action, get busy and get creative.

    And what a time of hibernation we have had, a time of such restriction and extreme on every level.

This has felt so frustrating for many, painful and traumatic for others and this is important to acknowledge. There are others, and I count myself in this group, who are very protected by the difficulties our society can throw at us and have come through this time, not only unscathed, but having learned and grown from this experience. For that I am truly grateful but I know I need to look at what is going on here and how to give back.

    I have spent the last year, learning and exploring the concept of collective trauma. This is something that gets passed down the generations and I believe that no one is spared of this, living in our modern world. Whether we were the winners or the losers in the many battles throughout history we carry the pain and pass it down to our offspring. This means that the new generation have those pain responses hard-wired into our psyche and our nervous system without the actual experience of the trauma itself. With each generation being brought up under this emotional strain there is an understanding that develops, that this is ‘normal’. The need to heal or even recognise it as a thing gets lost in the chaos we create out of the conflicts we build into our way of living together,

    Each new year is a chance to reinvent ourselves, to hook into Mother Nature’s natural impulses and emerge from our cocoon afresh, let go of our layers of pain and dig a little deeper to find the gold, the love, below. Each year we fail to do this and emerge the same as we always were.

    What will it take to drop further down into the wealth of healing available to us all? We will only take the first steps on this journey unless we are made aware of the possibilities that lie beyond the door we need to open first of all. 

Staying in our heads, within the limits of our ego mindsets will not help us find this. I believe we would do well to drop into our connection to Mother Earth and let her work through us. This is the energy of the archetype that this month carries, the ability to just be, let go of thought and judgement and tap into our creative selves, the part of us that knows the way forward instinctively, just as the trees and flowers grow out of the seed, so we can grow out of the huge ocean of love and compassion that lies beneath the sea of grief we all feel or numb ourselves from.

    Let’s not fear this journey but trust it is a path that once started can only lead to a better way of living, free from the pain we are terrified of looking in the eye, and free to blossom into who we are destined to be. 

 

Mixed Blessings

 What a month it’s been. Like a dog on a lead we’ve all been itching to get out of this confinement and spring into action. But like all things everything has its time. This month has been all about preparation, as the buds prepare to burst out from the winter’s stillness and the baby is preparing to leave the mother’s womb; timing is everything. The last stages of gestation cannot be rushed and no one understand this better than Mother Nature. Spending time with her is the blessing and the teaching. When we feel ourselves pulling against her and try and rush our way out of this she gently guides us and reins us in, if we choose to listen.

The Pisces constellation shows two fish bound together by a cord and held by a knot at a central point. They are pulling in opposite directions and here we find ourselves in polarity pulling against each other. The star that connects the two fish is called Typhon and is named after a great conflict in Greek Mythology and where we get the name typhoon.

It feels as if we are living in the middle of a storm, and finding the eye, the place of peace, at the core of this is vital. While we spend so much energy pitting our beliefs against each other, pulling in our directions of righteousness, I would like to call people to remember that conflict is gift, it is an opportunity to come together and respectfully learn from each other and grow.

Listening to an online talk by an American Rabbi i was drawn to a story about rope, about the fact that when a rope frays and we weave the broken ends back together, this part of the rope is stronger than any other part.

This is our opportunity to choose to work together to reconcile our conflicts, to surrender to the possibility that we may not be 100% right and that the ‘other’, who we believe we are in conflict with, might hold some of the answers too. Then we can grow back together stronger than ever because of the healing process we have chosen to work through.

There are always solutions to conflicts, when we are ready to let go of our fears, our need to control and our need to be right. This is our time. Let’s walk hand in hand with Mother Nature and let her guide us forward. She can teach us how to listen, empathise, slow down and nurture each other. 

Bringing our High Ideals Together?

 

This month I have been delving a little deeper into the relationships between ourselves and our community and how to solve the problems we find there. Frome is a very active town, working to find solutions to problems entrenched in our society. This is typical of the archetype of this month’s energy of Aquarius and how we address it is vital. We can either remain flying overhead, seeing the problems and endlessly discussing our high ideals or we can come down to earth and really engage. If we choose the latter, how we do this is crucial to our success.

One problem has been flying around my head for a long time now. I am increasingly distressed but at the same time curious about the great divide that is growing daily, between our beliefs, ideas for the future, and needs for the present. This is heightened by Social Media, of course. On top of this is an inability to see people who think differently from ourselves as having any iota of intelligence or goodness in them.

I sense that if we keep moving further to the extremities of our way of seeing things, whilst still believing ourselves to be in the right, we will never have a hope in resolving our differences or finding any harmony in our society.

Surely there is a better way. I know we all generally want the same things in life; peace, love and a feeling of belonging and anyone who doesn’t want those things i am really interested in hearing their wants. However, wanting the same things doesn’t mean we all look for them in the same way. This is what makes life interesting though, isn’t it? Imagine if we all thought the same way, what a dull world we’d inhabit.

However, I believe we are living in unprecedented times. We are going through a transition, an emergence into something quite new. Like the caterpillar that goes into the cocoon it has to breakdown completely before breaking out of it shell utterly changed. This means we are in a place that is unknown, uncharted territory, but we are also at the helm steering and creating as we go.

Having this power in our hands is quite frightening, but as with every hero’s journey it makes us strong. How are we going to come out of this and are we going to make it?

Personally, I believe that healing the divides that have come between us is paramount. 

I sense we are in two worlds at once, some people have their feet in the new, some are still in the old and some are straddling both. 

One subject that is causing great conflict is our medical system and particularly the virus and the vaccines that are being created to combat it. I am fascinated by the vitriol, the verbal abuse that is being hurled around and interestingly it is dividing sections of society I would have usually imagined, in most other circumstances, batting for the same team. My understanding is that much of the vitriol is created by the potential the Internet has to distort and muddy the truth. I am not going to go there.

What I want to consider is the fact that we are on the cusp of a new way of seeing the world, much like when the discovery was made that the world was round. I guess that for a long time both beliefs were held by many, until the new information became a norm (even though some, even today, dispute it).

Our world of medicine, for the last few decades, has been constructed around a world that only considers the physical dimensions. Centuries prior to this, a more mystical, spiritual view of healing was embraced. Although some held onto this ancient art of understanding the body and spiritual wisdom available to all, it was mostly stamped to by the witch burnings over the centuries. This created a fear around any use of, or the ability to connect and feel into these ways of being. 

Now they are returning and many people are beginning to truly understand the gifts that are freely available to use; simple ways of connecting to our greater body wisdom and natural healing energy. In recent decades, when transformational healing occurred without the intervention of modern medicine, it was called a miracle. Now miracles are occurring so often, as more people realise how beautiful this way of working is, it can no longer be seen as extraordinary. Of course, there are still many who choose to remain cynical and that is fine. It usually has to happen to yourself or someone close for you to believe it’s possible.

I believe that when a greater number of people begin to believe in the power of this healing and it becomes a norm then we will realise that there are choices available that will simplify our existence. Preventative medicine will be widely practised and our immune systems will be strong and capable of staving off even the harshest of viral diseases.

However, we are not there yet and at the moment we have people standing in both camps, both absolutely right in their beliefs, as both are real, but sadly, waiving their fists at each other.

How are we to solve this conundrum? How can we grow our perceptions so that we can encompass everyone’s beliefs, the old and the new, the physical and the holistic. Both are true, both make sense to the holder of their truth.

Things get messy when we let others take a possible truth and start manipulating it in order to create more chaos, more unrest and distress. This is the state of our Internet today and If we hold to this idea of righteousness at all cost and close our ears to the truth that others hold and we will all lose out in so many ways.

Let’s listen to what others have to say with kindness and take steps to come back to the middle ground where there is room for all to be heard. I would also invite people, rather than regurgitating what they have heard on an Internet platform, to speak from their hearts. Who knows what might emerge?