Inspiration

Sunday, the last day of March, is Spring’s New Moon, beginning the festival cycle Navaratri, which is a ten day opportunity to re-condition body and mind.  This transitional time aligns with the Aires New Moon, the doorway into  seasonal new life.   Bodies often feel internally spacey or tired, especially in the dark of New Moons, but when we have multiple cycle shifts happening, and strong planetary line ups, like now~it is doubly so.  This week is a time to stop and care for the body, take time to assess how and who and what is important. This is a moment for ‘Beginner’s Mind~Zen Mind.’ Stand wide on the mat, hang upside down, bring heart over head, and breathe into that heart, listen to it.  Feel the back of  the neck grow long, breath into the occipital spine.  This is the area that feeds vision.  Think about it.  When the neck tightens down, the head cant turn to see wider spectrums. While upside down, bend the knees and flop around, responding to a relationship with gravity, the give and take of earth.  Slowly roll back up the spine, see if heart has fed a wider vision. If nothing else, the brain has been bathed in fresh blood, preparing it for un-known territory. We need rich red blood for the month of April.  We need to grow as luminously soulful as possible.  We have profound un-known territory this month.  We have transformative shifts moving the world into greater confusion, un-expected commitments, and very different trajectories.  As always, some with be in the audience applauding, others will be on stage trying to remember their lines.  The issue will be that the script has changed and no one told the actors.  Time to improvise and trust.  And as the Aires New Moon dictates,……

Pulled inexorably into life, we cry and yearn for the womb.  Yanked unceremoniously into death, we hunger for life.  Between these two polarities lies the DNA of every subsequent face-off.  In the first polarities of inhaling and exhaling lies opportunity for renewal, vision, and reconciliation of opposites.  You’d think by now we might have learned to not struggle with polarity.  You hope that at this stage we would have enough angelic and human intuition for a divining GPS that embodies the light of who we are, what we need, and how we are to navigate. A ‘job description’ for taking an earthly incarnation could be: Synthesizing, assimilating, and digesting polarities.  We are no sooner done with one than embroiled in the next.  They now line up like planes waiting for take off at LAX.  This incessant struggle makes the breath shorter and smaller.  Perhaps if we re-trained the breathing, along with re-balancing the physical with the mental, and the emotion with the intellect, we’d have a stronger center, better at coalescing the mountain of incompatibilities. Even the large picture, the uber-issues that we feel don’t come under our personal jurisdiction, such as the weather, illness, and big business.  Even those could shift and grow less contrary if we addressed the polarities that have made them un-manageable and over-large.  The ancient Huna of Hawaii had the power to control weather until they lost it due to love of power.  It might now be our task to learn from them and take that power to love, creating ways and means of reconciling from center. Polarities are hard to give up because not only are we used to them, not only are they part of every diet, like refined sugar, but they are often much loved.  Polarities create chaos, and drama, grabbing limelight……

        March In New England Winter’s dark wreckage Is coin of the realm. Its choppy sea of crusted snow Covers a heaving earth Trembling in wait Wild with green longing, Juicy and plump Despite desiccated cold. I need only remember~ Remaining as rich as my dreams.   Astrology & Yoga of Transformation  The sliding doors of March prevail~setting set us up for what’s ahead while we look back in re-consideration to realign.   We move between Pisces spirit of endings and Aires New Year salvo of mastery.  They may collide.  That’s when we head to the mat and allow the perfection of Samasthiti/Equal Standing to imbue the body: Be present, become a delicate balance of spirit and human. We need every tool available in our Yoga toolbox for the volatile spring combinations headed our way.  If ever there was a time to practice responding instead of reacting, it is now.  And like all else, it is a practice.  Another practice in good stead is to grow consciousness and ask ourselves the difficult questions.  It’s an important time to pay attention to synchronicities and their symbolic resonance for this will help us make the best of necessary changes. The cosmic event of the grand cross, peaking April 20, will move lives beyond their old trajectories…some more than others.  Be prepared to be confused, and audacious, to be optimistic, and fearful, to remain aligned with your numinous-self, and take out the trash, perhaps with a big knife in hand.  If your life is not transformed, then perhaps you can stand at the ready to protect another whose life is shaken to the core.  Samasthiti.

Synchronicity.  Fate.  Moira.  A rose by any name, color, scent, or form calls us to attention, its beauty informing the moment.  I accept that when I have been given someone’s name three times by three different people, I’m to meet this person, absorb their scent, shape and color.  I feel fate intervene when I read the same idea, expressed by totally diverse authors, in the space of an afternoon. I pay attention. The synchronous-rose that is scenting the air at this moment is the idea that life is expensive, and we must spend hard-earned energy to pay for the goods.  Perception, compassion, wisdom, and fertilizer don’t come cheap.  The following quotes are the moira-nexus of this rose.  First is from the rolfer, Marius Strydom, not famous, but   thoughtful who wrote, “The world shows up for us but it doesn’t show up for free.”  Second, is the famous Mr. Jung who described free will as, “The ability to do gladly that which I must do.”  Last is the well known Jungian Astrologer, Liz Green, who writes, “This kind of free will does not come cheap: It is not a given.  It has to be fought for and the process of that fate is also the process of individuation.” No wonder we’re tired.  If we’re lucky not to be struggling for survival, but we’re working hard to figure out the fate of ‘that which we must do.’  We are paying the big energy-bucks to become aware, alive, individuated and transposed, if not translucent, possibly transparent.  The question is-would I have seen these messages if I had not been feeling life as demanding and difficult? Do I share in the responsibility of creating my sight, or is it a field outside of me? Is there such a thing as coincidence, or accidents? As……

In several classes this past week, I referred to the following words by Marianne Williamson.  Many of you requested the full quote from the real deal, which Marianne is.  So here you go!  Continue growing your Wizard muscles, hold her idea in high regard this year, because it is a time of  liberating ourselves, and manifesting…. two difficult and demanding requirements, but oh so necessary. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Part of the demand that we manifest is a Cardinal T square that is action-oriented, connecting us to the world.  If we are to play well together, some of our ideas and philosophies might have to change, (Jupiter/Pluto thrust.)  But the commitment and effort, required by Mars, could pay off in very nice dividends, if we are willing to listen as often as we command. Venus went retrograde at the Winter Solstice and remains backward in Capricorn through January.  This is a Venus that may feel inadequate, out of place, or shy,……

What do I want in this coming year?  Who shall I become?  How shall I pass through the eye of this needle?  How do I face the storms of my fear? What magic elixir is at hand to help? The Year of 2014 opens with a New Moon in Capricorn.  It is not the only Capricorn energy in the sky, Venus retrograde, and Pluto also visit this Saturn ruled sign.  Capricorn is about mastery and value.  A wizard is one who has mastery over Self, and values the many gifts of that self.  A wizard also claims mastery of time and space.  Wizard’s understands the alchemy of turning dross to gold.  Their real genius lies in understanding the alchemical components in fear, hatred, jealousy, shame, and ignorance and accepting them.  There is no turning a blind eye, or judging the darkness, rather-in the embrace and acceptance of what is, they transmute dross to gold.  Their gold is that of freedom, love, fulfillment, kindness, and joy. If we are to learn about becoming a wizard, it’s good to begin with the best.  The most famous is Merlin, of Camelot.  His home was a crystal cave.  His top student, Arthur- became king.  Their pivotal journey of transformation was called a quest, and the end of the quest was the discovery of the Holy Grail.  For their story to have meaning, view it symbolically.  Merlin embodies inner wisdom, true for women as well as men.  The crystal cave is the chrysalis home, the heart, which holds the mysteries of enlightenment.  The young Arthur is the un-tutored self, the daring fool willing to risk, hoping to find the gold of the Holy Grail.  The quest is a life journey, and the Holy Grail is the spiritual, imaginative, Soul-Self. If the planets are offering support……