DAILY In our endings lie our beginnings. The power of graduations is they symbolize the work accomplished that opens the next level. Each birth is the first step towards death. Thresholds, cycles, wheels, call it what you will, 2012 offered multiple time and space opportunity to see the cause and effect of our actions, to comprehend the wisdom, and the shadow in our choices. Consequences have grown more defined, intentions- more visible. ‘What goes around comes around’ is coming around faster and faster. Having survived the turbulence of the past 365 days, we hopefully cross the threshold into 2013 with greater consciousness, greater heart. 2012 ended a number of cycles, and in those endings we can choose to access faster bandwidths, more options, along with a demand for greater potency, and compassionate intuition. As our amplification ascends from the Manipura/third chakra (emotional focus) to the Anahata/fourth chakra (heart wisdom), we breakthrough self-centered impetus into heart-driven awareness, especially around feminine, or receptive, power. Our ideas of creativity are expanding. We have a greater comprehension in our relationship to self, which transforms all other relationships. We are motivated toward partnerships that nurture and foster caring consciousness. We support one another in listening to music from the spheres beyond the physical. We are dancing with difficult truths, requiring subtle, transformational wisdom. This territory is for the truly courageous. It is harder and harder to be someone we are not. We are making fundamental changes relating to our authority, integrity, accountability, and relationships. We are more capable of healing our own shadow material so we may move on, so we might know our ‘true name.’ 2013 may be an extraordinary year in the acceptance of ALL our unique light and shadow-Selves. Again, courage is a password to what lies ahead as we are willing to… Read more »
Read moreInspirations: Transformation
Take Back The Night
The numinous has been leeched from our bones by the radioactive society we’ve created. We worship the maudlin and horrific, the mundane and safe. We are frightened by mystery and magic. The ancient mystery of the Winter Solstice has departed, gone in pre-Christmas flounce and flurry. What was most sacred is now scarcely noted, roared past as road kill. Ritual re-sanctifies and empowers because we become the catalysts to bring forth healing and transformation. We do not use an intermediary to ask for absolution, which puts power in their hands, not ours. The solstice, like the equinox, are perfect moments to stand still with the Gaia. Take stock. Participate with nature. Re-connect to earth’s cycles. The on-going unspeakable tragedies, some Nature’s doing, all too many man’s creation, tell us we need to re-connect, to one another, to the earth, to our own spirit. It is time to re-invent ourselves, so that communities care for the disenfranchised, cities re-claim their homeless. Let us be different in this long dark night, let us light the light within. If it’s religion that feeds you, make a new space within its old traditions. “The goal in the etymology of the word ‘religion’ is to re-link us to the Universal.” (Jessica Murray in Mt. Astrologer) This is the same goal Yoga propounds– link our Practice to life, become a bridge, or lynch pin to expanding consciousness. We are bits and pieces of an eco system that we need to nurture, not the other way around. This is particularly true during dark cycles, when much of the animal and plant life are dormant. Our dormancy often carries us toward depression, sickness, SAD, even suicide because we’ve misplaced the light within. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh said, “Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.” We pass through… Read more »
Read moreImpossible to Predict
Is there a better reason for living than to discover who we are? Is there anything more powerful than becoming our true colors, then sending them out to seep into the world, where as wild dyes they/we sustain, transform, and pigment everyone and everything touched? As the forces of change build to a momentous turning point – the ending of a 26,000 year cycle, announced with this year’s winter solstice, it is critical we seed and impart this transformative time with Grace, not fear, with joy, not divisiveness, with wisdom not delusion. Nothing new in that, but the timing is insistent. There is deep need to pay attention to anything that directs us toward knowing and serving true-self, like Yoga, creativity, and poetry, Astrology and ripe friendships. These are constructs that nurture soul so we might bloom as one of Rumi’s roses…. “If you want to know Him and yourself Look at this open rose- From one infinite silent drunken heart So many petals, so many worlds.” One of the reasons I love poetry is that like the horoscope it can reveal essential self, as does a Yoga Practice, only differently. If you re-read last week’s breath, “Why and Because,” the creative process offered another exploration of the same. There is reason humanity has expressed through these archetypal forms for thousands of years. Each is a superb structure to hold the mysteries, and support the devotion required to unlock a DNA, to plumb secrets of the evolutionary heart. Going within is difficult. There is a reason few have explored consciousness. That is changing as we come to embrace the breadth and depth of our spirit and soul. We need prediction less. We trust more. Science acknowledges that everything on earth relates: ecological systems, planetary systems, human societies, the physics of… Read more »
Read moreWhy & Because
Why Do we only search for God when love is missing? If we were ecstatic, love-filled beings, why would we ever seek to change? Is there a conspiracy running all religions to keep us fearful and unhappy? If filled with light, why feel a need to turn to priest, rabbi, Imam, or Maharishi? If love destroys fear and fills us with courage, how is it we are so frightened we must hate? We need love, like breathing. How and why do we refuse it in a thousand small ways? Why is there not more of it, or the visible signs of it? What do you think – ‘Why?’ Because It is the time to question assumptions. It is the hour to re-evaluate old fears and bring them to light. The stuff of dreams is love, for it lends its intelligence, its imagination, its light, its passionate breath to everything within heart-sight. Love lifts us beyond our ordinary self toward spontaneous combustion. We know all this. We’ve struggled with it for years, if not centuries. I’m not trying to solve the earth’s biggest problem in this paragraph…would that I could. No, what brings this front and center is I recently choreographed to an old Beatles song, “Because,” off the Abbey Road album. In working with it day after day, its simple refrain of, ‘”Love is old, love is new, love is old, love is you,” sunk below the surface, down into bone and muscle to emerge days later in large questions. Because body/mind connections are far more complicated and transformative than we know, I’ve found through the years that one of the lovely gifts of creating anything is the surprising syntax, and synchronicity that flow from opening oneself to the process. I think it’s partially because we grow profoundly… Read more »
Read moreThe Ground of Heaven
Celebrating the sublime conundrum of deaths’ burnished brilliance on The Day of The Dead, is satisfying. We might be as leaves, flaming out in high-flying colors, lofted into winds for a last dance. Is it not a death many of us would envy? If we but un-clutch, releasing the branch, we will slide into home base, and snuggle in colorful piles with our friends, held at last by Mother Earth….Wow! Sign me up for that one. Reaching the end of any cycle and perceiving ourselves as incandescent beauty, is a major achievement. All rotations, be it the seasons, a life span, a planetary circling bring a time of release and dying, otherwise we cannot begin again. But facing the end of any cycle brings sadness. We recognizing change and aging. It forces the psyche within, just as winter’s bone-life shoos the body inside. Endings are where we hope to face our deepest fears and desires. Yes, we sit by fires, drinking blood red wine, but also consciously, or un-consciously, begin preparations for spring birth. In order to do so we must shed old skins so that what is crying to be born has opportunity for breath. The Day of The Dead is the ground of heaven when we face ‘limits that need respect, and look at the limitations we must transcend.’ (Stephanie Austin) The Universe supports these inner and outer cycles with layers of helpful energies: Fall’s last hurrah is the territory of Scorpio’s frozen waters of death and rebirth, profound passion, and innate desires that take us to the bottom of issues. Though most of us do not celebrate the dead as our ancestors did, we yet have a celebration that holds space, so when we are ready to return to the richer life of spirit, old rituals lie… Read more »
Read moreQuestioning The Harvest
What sort of a ‘farmer’ have I been? Did I grow enough for a long winter? Which dreams died this year? What was born? What nutrients, provided by mistakes, failures, and mis-steps will help grow new seeds? We lie under in a night sky, tiny and supercilious until exposed to Luna’s enormous Light. Her quivering, round, emotional body questions our smallness, begging a larger life of more connection and meaning. The fall’s Harvest Moon provokes ancestor bones to move beyond the flat, daily drone to ask, “What do those of us, who no longer work the land, actually harvest?” What do I cultivate when I do not turn over soil, dig under stalk and chaff? Am I producing anything of substance, or sustenance? Our ancestors howled when standing under a Full Moon, allowing her magic to prepare them for cycles of death and re-birth. When our bodies are infused with that ancient tribal awareness, the light of Luna’a wisdom promotes timeless, archaic, immutable, archetypal memory that requires no word of praise, only inquiry, questing, and howling. Any harvest is an end, and a beginning, provoking cyclical questions from this life, as well as other times and places: Do I honor the courage and steadfastness that brought this crop to harvest? Did I refuse my own gifts along the way? Will I allow this year’s mistakes, and failures, despondency, and carelessness to become the mulch and manure for next year’s seed? What failed to harvest? Why? Do my fears interfere with talents to produce? How? What showered me with abundance? In what new, more powerful ways will I husband spring seed? Am I willing to share the abundance? What does that look like? With whom do I share? Who is my tribe? How have I transformed from this harvest? How, and… Read more »
Read moreDancing With Our Daimon
Do you find yourself shutting out your inner voices because you have no time to listen, much less do what they ask? Do you see yourself so overwhelmed by ‘helpful technology,’ and the day’s requirements that neither dharma, soul purpose, or spirit can get through? It is time to create space for our Daimon to come home. To the ancient Greek’s, Daimon meant genius, which had to do with one’s potency, not so much smarts. Plato wrote about it in “The Republic,” calling it a guiding spirit, or a fiery spirit that was not only responsible for our destiny in this life, but carried the soul from life to life as an ‘inner deity.’ Plato’s daimon was pure energy, a beacon to pull us into life’s rich, true purpose, to learn necessary lessons. There was no judgment about good or bad, moral or immoral. It was about the drive to dive into the mulch and manure and simply have a living experience. Why do we need our daimon more than ever? We need lynch pins for our multiple selves, that army of complex voices begging for attention and care. Multi-tasking is nothing compared to multi-being. We must embrace the paradoxical notion that every truth has a valid opposite. We need all the help we can get to see us to the other side of the many hard-choices big change demands. We cannot give up a ‘destiny’ to merely survive as a mushroom, can we? Embarrassed though we may be, most of us would nod ‘yes’ to being a mushroom if it keeps us safe. It requires so much courage and energy to continually throw ourselves out there, to step up to the plate and risk in new ways…no nets, no bungee cords, only re-newed passion for each experience. The psychologist,… Read more »
Read moreThe Really Big Picture
If “the goal of the journey is to discover yourself as consciousness,” as Joseph Campbell said, then what revelations did this summer’s wing-ding of an Astrological force-field bring you? These past months of inner heightened intensity and emotional landmines, seen via the outer picture through ‘The Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami and nuclear spill, the Syrian revolt, and the downfall of Khadafi, to enumerate a few, bring most bodies to new doorways. Were you engulfed? Or were you one of the more fortunate to be merely drop-kicked out the back door? You may have see yourself changing via another, perhaps your teenager who stood with a raised fist, wrapped in a black glove? Is there a new voice within declaring greater freedom, more power over self? I’m asking because we have a few months of respite to reorganize ourselves before the next big planetary hurricane returns in the spring of 2012. This fall and winter give us time to clean up what we could not finish over the summer. The same issues, perhaps in a different form, will be back, with the planetary repetition, and the ‘perfection of the Pluto-Uranus square.’ What have we learned? What needs loving repair? What is the depth of the wound? How do we heal Self, and other? Clearing the old emotional detritus from the door of consciousness offers an unbelievably powerful appointment with our Dharma. Our inner Arab Spring has greater chance of a long term Democratic shift if we prepare for the uprising by giving Spirit greater say, ego less. If we can spend time on the childhood wounds, and see them as symbolic, then chances are we begin to understand them and recognize them as they come up over and over, in different forms. What is the metaphor for the discomfort? How… Read more »
Read more