Shining like the Sun

photo Mark Brookes

We have certainly been experiencing the fullness of what the Leo archetype invites us to embody this time around.  I have been writing my blogs for a few years now and as the year turns I often worry that I will be repeating myself each time I put pen to paper, or rather finger to key.However, I always marvel at the subtle differences each year brings and sometimes the differences are not so subtle.

This is mainly due to the idea that I see our life journey as a spiral, ever since I began this way of interacting with my view of our world and universe. I sense that every journey, each birth, begins at a point in space and time and spirals out, turning with each yearly cycle. We return to the same place on the radius of the circle, but having grown and experienced another year with each orbital return, the spiral energy takes us further away from our start point. Each time we are raising our vibration, whatever that feels or looks like; the positive or the negative.

This year, the intensity of the critical times we are living in, has brought this archetype to an all time peak. The Leo lion embodies the self, the ego and like all archetypes has a shadow and a light aspect. The Leo that fully understands who they are and where they come from can stand tall and confident with their ancestors standing supportively on their shoulders. From here they shine and display generosity and kindness to all in their domain. They know that to give is to receive and that everything they need comes from within, there is no limit or shortage.

This Leo is a king/queen in all the best senses of this word.  The Leo lion that embodies the divine masculine so beautifully lives within their society as an individual that shines so that the community can shine as a whole. (The community is represented by Aquarius, its opposite sign on the wheel.This is how we create balance.) 

This is my idea of utopia. 

When the opposite is true and ego is cut off from a greater understanding of itself, isolated and fearful, then the self is diminished in every way and the need to keep everything as close as possible, for fear of losing the little we have, becomes the mindset. The king/queen needs everything around themselves to feel safe and validated, so words like sovereignty become all important and generosity is only possible to those considered to be kin. This word is a moveable feast, it can expand and contract as our ego can. Kin can mean just our close unit family or expand to the family of the whole of human kind. The choice is ours, as is our choice to be in shadow or to step into light.

When I saw the news filled with the fires that were creating a state of emergency in this country, it felt like the call to action was encroaching ever closer. The sun, our archetypal father was and will continue to use its power to bring the point home to us until we are willing to see. Fire is a life saver and a killer, the choice is ours. If we will not respond to the gentle nudges, the lighter touch, then the darker energies will have to find a way to get through to us in ways that aren’t so pleasant.

Ironically, the shadow often seems like our only option when we are scared or feel we have limited resources. Sadly, this is hard and painful road is often the one humanity takes. 

It is the road we are currently on as a society and I count my blessings daily that though I am on this journey too (it is inescapable whilst living in this country at this time), I do not have to buy into the fear or the unhappiness it can cause. However, I do have to recognise that while I am here and experiencing this process, I feel the need to take responsibility for the negativity I will be holding. No one is outside the circle.

There is much beauty to be experienced still and this becomes more and more important to connect with if we are to create a society where everyone is welcome, with a seat at the table and an equally full plate of food. In this place everyone is served and all serve.

What many don't see is that part of the fear is a fear of power, power that is good, that is filled with love. To embody the Leo energy truly we would do well to understand that power must come from love, just as love must come from power. Both these words contain both strength and humility in the same measure. We have forgotten this, the words have lost their true meaning and worth and we suffer the consequences. 

I was inspired to write a line in a song a while back, (sadly I can’t remember where the inspiration came from) it goes;
We help the child who fears the night,

Who helps those who fear the light.

While we are blind to the fact that nearly all of us hold this fear within, and so constantly recreate it without, we will never choose to do the work necessary to overcome the fear. This needs an awareness that will only come if we are pushed to see the dystopian path we are on and our part in upholding it. We will see more clearly if we stop looking at the physical world we are destroying and spend a little more time connecting with a world that lies within us all; a world, and a version of ourselves, that has infinite patience, positivity and love for ourselves.

We are all powerful, strong and unconditionally loving, more so than any of us could possibly imagine. Let's rediscover this.

Learning to Feel Everything

I am writing this on one of the most important days in our political times. A day when, I have just heard it said, our government has reached a moment of disarray never before seen in our country. And what surprises me is that people seem surprised, as if they couldn’t see it coming.

As always in these moments I like to take a broader view and look back to what brought us here. Personally, the only positive I could find as we moved towards Brexit was that the situation might get so bad in this country, it would force us to wake up to reality; the reality of what we are doing to our world and how absolutely unsustainable it is in any shape or form.

Big changes are needed and they will not happen easily. If we don’t choose the change the change will be forced upon us and it won’t be pretty. Brexit, I hoped, might speed up the process, rather than having to go through a prolonged agony, make it short and sweet.

Either way this is going to hurt, hurt us where we most feel it and this month the archetype is where we feel everything most keenly.

The archetype of Cancer, as we travel around the year is the first sign that deals with the emotions as it is the element of water. It is also ruled by the moon, our Mother  and so takes us on journey of feeling into our family, and what that means as we connect to our ancestral line, our roots and culture.

Since my awakening, I have enjoyed looking at our place in the universe by using images, it simplifies my tendency to over complicate things and can be a lot of fun. One image that always comes back to me is the concentric circles and joining TreeSisters and seeing these as rings in the trunk of a tree brought this home even more. 

These circles can be used in all ways of seeing the world from the tiny to the vast. We can view them personally in our own individual chakra system as they expand out from our body and we can experience this as a mirror in the way the planets revolve around our sun. They are all interlinked. We live in a multi-dimensional world and can choose to move energetically in and out of these circles depending on our openness and the choices we make.

We can also look at this image and take an emotional view; how far can we extend our ability to love. This is different for everyone and depends on so many things but it can be simplified if we look at where we stand on the love to fear ratio. The more we are open to love the further we can expand this energy into the world and obviously the opposite is true that if we are feeling more fearful then our energy is contracted.

Cancer is symbolised by the crab and this shows us another way of how we deal with our feelings of love or fear beautifully with its soft underbelly showing our vulnerability and its hard shell being the protector. 

For me, the problem starts when we see being vulnerable as negative and being the protector as being good. Then how we view and deal with problems in life becomes way out of balance. We are a society that has forgotten how to feel, which has what has got us into this crisis, I believe the only way out is to find our strength through feeling everything. (More about this in a future blog.)

I see our culture as it journeyed through the centuries and how at each juncture we have chosen the route of fear most of the time (the post war creation of the welfare state was one of a few exceptions) and until we break out of this cycle our decisions are going to remain based on keeping everything close to our skin, holding only those near to us as important. The more we fear life the more we want to protect just those in our tight family circle (a family circle can be whoever we feel most bound to, at home, work or play) and see everyone else as dangerous. This means as our view becomes more and more imbalanced and dysfunctional, we create an over exaggerated idea of our own self-importance.

We are seeing this today with our soon to be ex-Prime Minister clinging on for dear life to his status and delusional belief in his self-importance. The mirrors are all around him, whether he is seen to be behaving like Trump or even beginning to mirror his adversary, Putin. who has seemed to become his single focus. Once again, going back to the concentric circle imagery, he seems to be capable of only reaching into the first of the circles, where he finds only himself and his main opponent, who is, of course, also, himself. This inner conflict is something we all have to battle with, but only the few get to turn these into real war-games.

If it wasn’t so important for our country’s welfare it would be a beautiful play. However, if we can see it for what it is we might take the metaphor to understand ourselves a little better, for he is only mirroring this painful state of being in us all, and choose to grow from it.

It is my belief that we can only step into the next important stage in our journey as humanity when we can include everyone in our circle, when we expand our love into the most outer of our concentric circles. Then we can also make the shift together without pain or fear. That is my vision; maybe it's yours too?

Dropping In

Life has got busy again, the sun is out and I feel that everyone is charging around hoping to fill every moment with wonderful things. Well, this is the time for it. This month’s archetype is all about the busy bee pollinating and communicating, using the air waves to get its message out. And we are reflecting this as humans, we can’t help ourselves, it’s the law of nature.

So how do we do this without driving ourselves into overload or using it as a distraction for what we really should be getting busy about. Filling our lives with joyous things doesn’t necessarily make us feel happy if at our root we are distressed and troubled. Unfortunately the times are getting so critical that anxiety is becoming more normal and managing this is going to be a real need. Our attempts as a society generally to deal with this isn’t cutting the mustard and avoidance tends to the chosen route instead.

One thing we would do well to be aware of is that the ruler of this astrological month of Gemini is Mercury. He is known as the trickster, the fool, and is happy to turn our world upside down in order for us to ‘get it’. He was the only Greek god that could travel between the worlds. What he is really doing is being the go-between, the communicator between the higher and lower realms, whether that is our internal realms or the external world. It is up to us how we work with this.

My journey for the last few years has been into the shadows, discovering the collective trauma in my ancestral line, that makes up who I am. It is in-built into us at a cellular level, and even if we think we have had an easy life as an individual, it doesn’t take much investigation to find difficult stories lurking in the lives of our forefathers. If we haven’t had an easy life then we know exactly where to look. We can ignore this at our peril.

If we refuse to connect with our inner or higher selves and block our ears to the growing feelings of unrest that are bubbling up inside us then we will remain ungrounded and have no support system to guide us through the troubled waters we are entering. We can always receive help from those around us, but there is nothing like being connected to our own personal strength and wisdom in these times.

I am going to spend my time this summer doing very little, as far as is possible, rediscovering the inner stillness I had before I started this journey. It brought up a lot of pain and sadness for me and most of it has been absorbed by my body; this is what we often do. This is not a bad thing, it's just part of the process and to stop there would negate all the work I have done. It is important to see these journeys to the end and not get distracted by 'shiny things'!

I am hoping that Mercury will be with me, laughing and joking, as he helps me connect to my inner guidance system, find a little more of my joy again (I never lost it but it sometimes gets buried!) and my peace of mind, body and spirit.

I hope this resonates with you in some way.

photo Mark Brookes

 

Enough is Enough?

When I launched my book in Pisces, my intention was that it would be birthed into an energy of expansiveness. I wanted it to be like a small drop in the universal pond that could slowly ripple out into the world bringing whatever healing and effect was needed. 

That was my intention. Sometimes intentions take quite a while to pan out, as I realised that the day I had chosen - because it was near my birthday and was within the realms of possibility as far as the publishers were concerned - turned out to be the day we went to war. That was not my intention! However, I know the universe works in mysterious ways and it is best not to question events that are far bigger than, and may seem to conflict with, our individual paths.

As we arrived in Taurus, my intentions for this month was to slow down and be in tune with Mother Nature. I was overjoyed to see my garden in glorious abundance. This is our second spring in our new house and the fruit trees simply exploded into blossom. It is very exciting. As I continue to expand my desire to connect with Mother Nature I couldn’t wish for a better environment to be in.

Interestingly, I realised that the more I connected the more I began to feel the grief of growing up with a lack of connection. I grew up in a city and I was never curious enough to pay attention to nature or ask about it and of course, I was oblivious to the lack. My education began slowly in adult life. Better late than never, I say, but the void inside me that I am trying to fill sometimes feels overwhelming and the task impossible. Other times I know it is simply way overdue and I just need to let go. At brief moments in my life, I have let go and the sense of reconnection was so beautiful it was life-changing. It is the beacon that lights my way.

With a background of personal abundance in an interesting balance as Covid shut down a lot of my work, I feel I am being asked to evaluate what abundance really means. In my little world all seems well. Yet, when I raise my head above the parapet, at the world beyond, the threat of war escalating out of control is slowly looming on the horizon like a dark cloud.

Where does this sit inside me? As we step ever closer to a shift in consciousness where we may choose to rise out of the mindset of control and aggression, what are we going to choose? At the moment we are choosing a life based on a constant need for more, to fill the hole that disconnection creates inside us all. Although I may speak the words of peace, what energy is residing inside of me? I know I have to keep doing the work of finding harmony within so I can put that out in all areas of my life not just what I appear to say.

This feels paramount and I don’t know of anyone who can honestly they have completed this task. 

The closer we get to events that seem terrifying, the more I feel we are teetering on the edge of a shift, a rebirth. I don’t know what the future holds and part of me feels, or maybe hopes, that it won’t be a specific event but more like a gradual dance of the shadow and light that we will create. We are all the choreographers and I know what I want my dance to look like, do you?

However, we are eight billion all making our individual choices and what we choose is completely in the balance. We have seen this in the UK with the Brexit vote being so close, France also.

I believe the UK voted out of fear and is now feeling the consequences and we are going to have to learn the hard way how to steer ourselves back to a way of living with love in our hearts. This begins with the light and dark being in balance, in harmony with itself. When we choose to remove the judgement then we can lift ourselves out of the illusion of separation and into the uniting, blissful energy of love.

This is the time to start, when Mother Nature is inviting us to lie in her arms and be embraced, to feel her love as she breathes out everything and more than we could possibly want. When we learn that we are all of the same source and remove the idea of competition and turn it into cooperation, when we discover that less is more and that the world has enough to satisfy our needs but not enough for our greed (words of Mahatma Gandhi) then we will start to shift. Then we will stop choosing war and learn the way of peace.

 

A is for Aries

And here we are back at the beginning again, the turn of wheel, as it spins once more heralding the Spring Equinox, the Pagan New Year. 

This represents the beginning of all things; the new year, the birth of the human life, indeed, all creative journeys.

I love this time of year when the buds are bursting into view, the energy is powerful and vital. It is concerned only with its purpose, a singular mission, rocket fuelled by that burst of inspiration. Here, there is no room for judgement, self-doubt or fear. When rooted in Mother Nature as all of the natural world is, then the act is simple. However, when we are uprooted, disconnected from Mother Nature, like many people living in our modern world, then we come into being without the love and support of the universal love and are born into fear.

Our Western culture has its roots in the Old Testament, whatever your beliefs or non-beliefs. As a collective this is our oldest story which most of us are brought up with. You would have to work quite hard to avoid it entirely, and if atheism is your chosen path you wouldn’t have to go back far in your lineage to find ancestors who truly believed. This is all part of what makes us who we are. We can come into life believing whatever we feel inspires us, but deep in our ancestral DNA these stories pervade our subconscious and our mindset, whether we like it or not.

I have been exploring this over the last few years and this has brought me back, time and again, to an image, the image of a tree. I find I cannot escape it, for it is the embodiment of all that we are and all the journeys we have taken.

I see our journey starting in the roots, in the trunk of the tree, connected and whole in our understanding of the world and our part in it. This is represented by the Garden of Eden. 

As we believe we were thrown out of this place of love, of oneness, we began a journey built on trauma and shame. We felt abandoned, separated from our home, our hearts and this separation created our new reality, steeped in duality. This was a journey that created conflict within, as our heart was separated from our head, and our head, or rather our ego, lost the wisdom of the heart and began to think itself superior. This is also represented by the masculine over ruling the feminine. - It is important to state that neither is good or bad, right or wrong but when we fall out of balance we can become judgemental. - In this way, we have lost our ability to live in right relation between the two.

As the centuries turned into millennia, the conflicts within continued to manifest the conflicts without and soon we moved from the trunk of the tree into the initial three branches with the three Abrahamic faiths and then with the conflicts within these faiths into the many branches and twigs. Soon the battles between race, the different religions, and sexes found their way into communities and even families until we have more people living alone than our society or our sanity can handle. 

Here we are, living as the very leaves on the ends of the branches as far away from the root as we can possibly be. Our inner conflict has created an ego so fearful and fragile, so stuck in its righteousness and self-belief, it becomes increasingly hard to  conceive of trying to reconcile some of the mounting issues with the ‘others’ in our life, who may be many and growing. 

It seems to me, we are standing at the top our castles, looking at other cultures who might do things very differently to us, feeling greatly superior and that our way of life is completely normal. As other cultures seem to become more extreme, I ask, isn’t that because we are sitting on the opposite side of the see-saw. As we teeter, either at the top of the see-saw, or on the tips of the branches waiting for the fall (excuse the pun) I wander which way we are going to go. Are we willing to recognise the position we are in and stop pointing fingers at others, believing ourselves to be completely in the right or are we willing to climb down off our pedestal and find a more harmonious way of existing with others in this beautiful world while it is still beautiful?

Expanding our View

This time of year always sits well with me. We are moving out of the cold, quiet mode of winter and preparing to come out of our shell. The signs of spring become more and more present, and as we feel our spirits lift and then being flattened again by the constant news of war, finding ways to deal with these conflicting emotions is vital for our well being.
War is very much the archetypal energy of next month, Aries, whereas immersing ourselves in the blissful, womblike energy of Mother Nature’s love is where we are now. If we can embrace the energy that is offered us now, it will help us as we hope to leap into action in Aries, timing is everything.
I like to contemplate what is going on for us right now. We are only just getting to grips with the idea that the pandemic is easing. As we are gradually ‘getting back to normal’ - ready or not -  this is exactly what I feel we shouldn’t be doing, as we have been unwilling to make necessary changes to our unsustainable lifestyle. 
I also sensed that if we ignored this then the next ‘opportunity’ would soon be coming our way, the next monster would rear its head. However, I suspect few were expecting something like this or as quickly as this. But this is what we are facing, whether we want to look or not.
On the flip side, this week Frome hosted a Kindness Festival, the first of its kind and I was delighted to see how beautifully it unfolded. One event was called Kindness in Politics. This brought up all kinds of ideas, some fresh, some well-trodden.
I want to talk about a few of them here. The first was the idea that our modern politics has no understanding of kindness these days and has actually become based on cruelty. 
One of the speakers, who is an MP, heralded the structure we have in Parliament today, saying it was the only way we could have good decisive outcomes. There was, thankfully, a tumbleweed moment in the room when the speaker finished. I was relieved to know that I was not alone in disagreeing with this idea. 
My sense was that our politicians today, like so many people (and I believe our politicians simply mirror the voice of the people of the time) are so bound up in their personal story they do not have the capacity to see beyond this. 
I see the world metaphorically like a set of Russian Dolls or rings around a tree. We can move in and out of these states from a contracted way of being to an expanded one. This very much depends on our own energy, if we are relaxed, contented and feeling secure then our personal boundaries can expand to an open sense of self. If we are feeling tense, traumatised and insecure then we contract our energies and struggle to see beyond our own personal life. This can work collectively also, for communities or nations.
I believe our politicians have a tiny perspective of the world. They are an elitist, privileged sector of society (and those not born into this sphere are quickly swallowed up into this mindset) that keeps itself bound together behind huge iron gates, physical and emotional. Brought up, mostly, in our public schools, they are introduced to a world based on cruelty and bereft of any emotional intelligence or awareness. This is what they know and this is what they continue to create around them, a world of power and control. 
The public that have also been brought up in a world of cruelty and devoid of love, because of the systems that have been built on these painful ideologies, continue to vote them in because that is what they know, and change can often seem even more scary.
This life we have built has become normalised and so we begin to believe it is good and right. When people in different cultures hold opposing beliefs, this can feel threatening and so we believe they must be in the wrong.
I am fascinated by this as I always like to look at the widest perspective possible. That is the nature of having five planets in Pisces. Pisces is the last phase in the yearly journey and using the Russian dolls image, it is the largest of the dolls, containing all the others within it.
I had an interesting conversation, decades ago, with a Christian friend. I tried to suggest the idea that whatever our beliefs about life and death, the truth of what comes before or after life for humans must be the same for all of us. I put forward the idea that if an alien could see us as a human race they would see the commonality between us all. It is only when we become stuck in our beliefs and dogmas that we think that there can be different doorways or gods for each religion or race. I cannot grasp that, we are all the same, as far as I’m concerned, we just have different views.
In this way I try to perceive the war we are witnessing on our screens from all viewpoints. It was said that General Rommel in the Second World War attempted to view the war from his opponents point of view, and this gained him respect as a General. 
I like to view this war from an outsider’s stance looking at the West. I would see a society that invented the nuclear weapon. I would see a society, the only one, that used the nuclear weapon on its enemy, twice. I also see a society that leads the way in stripping the Earth of its resources for its own needs, bringing the world to a climate crisis. I see a society that judges other societies when they try and climb the same ladder that they climbed and then call them irresponsible. 
When we engaged in the war with the Islamic State, they were seen as the ultimate evil, but I imagined that they might be reacting to what they saw as the decadence in our society, the degradation of the feminine being one of many other issues. Their reaction was extreme, but it only seemed so extreme as we have normalised the extremity of our way of destroying the feminine energy in our world. This has brought us to the point of destruction of the mother, Mother Earth. 
Here we are again, in 2022, pointing the finger at a man who is acting out an extremist and terrifying agenda, without taking any responsibility for our own. This might seem greatly distorted but I feel that is the problem with our own distortion, our view that we are right and everyone else who behaves differently is wrong. I am not saying, of course, that IS or Putin are in any way right, I am just suggesting that they are mirroring our shadow in an equal and opposite disfigured way.

Gandhi said that if you want change you have to be the change. How are else are we going to get ourselves out of this continuous cycle of war and pain? It is time to choose love not war, starting with love for ourselves and then we can begin to expand this ever outwards.

 

The Icarus Problem

It is an extraordinary time, experiencing the speed of everything as the months come and go, and the intensity of events as they seem to pile up on top each other. While I remain doing most things from the comfort of my armchair it still feels a little overwhelming. How I am going to acclimatise to life, as it starts to reclaim a kind of normality, is beyond me. 

Then again, I can immediately see that I am resorting all these slightly over-dramatic words while at the same time I am able feel nothing at all. These waves of highs and lows are a new phenomenon for me having spent most of my life at an even keel. 

I am not complaining about any of this, I am just commenting and noticing, noticing how what’s happening for me seems to be amplified when I look out at the world.

What I am also noticing, as I examine the time of year we are experiencing, that once again I feel we are missing a trick. Aquarius, the water bearer, is an air sign, the last of the three and is inviting us to think big, communally and globally. My fear is that the opposite is true. Once again I am being over-dramatic because it is not really a fear, just a comment.

Birds, such as the eagle, are associated with this sign because they are capable of sustained flight. Their bird’s eye view gives them a big picture understanding of the world but also a detached one. We, as a culture, seem to engage in the latter. This can be dangerous as Aquarius also is associated with science, our brain power engaged in problem solving our way through life, without attaching ourselves intellectually or emotionally to any of the consequences. 

These are the shadow aspects of this sign, the positive ones are about the individual, having sorted their problems and saved their soul in Capricorn, coming down from the mountain and engaging fully with the community.

Forgetting these positive attributes has brought us to a point of deep crisis without recognising this or that we should take any responsibility for where we find ourselves. We have been taught to put our faith in the fact that other people will sort out life’s difficulties and that we are powerless to do anything, or have any control around these issues.

I believe the opposite is true. I believe science after decades of teaching us to disassociate, is now trying to show us that our involvement is key. Our engagement is not only required but has already created this situation and only our involvement with a changed attitude, and an engaged heart, will get us out of it. We would do well to stop judging others for perceived wrong doing, for perceived wrong ways of thinking and start accepting that there are many ways to live on this earth and maybe our way, with our modern methods, is not working. 

While we engage with the detachment aspect of this archetype we are forgetting the big picture, the bird’s eye view and getting caught up in the small. We need to turn the telescope around from the microscopic view to the macro, bring everyone into focus as a whole and work out new ways to see and respond to people who live and think differently from ourselves, in our society and outside of it.

The choice is ours, learn to live together or die together and either way Mother Earth will be fine with it. She understands and feels deep love while being able to remain detached in one beautiful state of balance. We have the chance to reconnect and relearn, but we don’t have that long.

I believe in divine timing and we will reach a critical point, we may have already reached it, and then it will be change or be forced to adapt when the changes are made for us.

I am putting most of my energy these days into working through the changes I feel I need to address, internally and externally. 

I have spent the last seven years writing my latest book which has just arrived on my doorstep. It’s a deep enquiry into our collective shadow and even I was surprised the answers that I drew from it as it almost wrote itself. I learned that if you pose a question and deliberate and cogitate on it long enough amazing results may come. I am going to continue to apply this to the rest of my life and see what comes. It’s a long uphill journey but it’s one I believe I have to take and relies using both aspects, the detached, bird’s eye view and the deep community engagement. 

From my book and CD and the film I created last year I hope to create resources that will enable others to join me on this quest and I believe there is a great deal that will be gained from such an endeavour. Next month I talk more about how I am going to engage with this. I  hope you will stay tuned.